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Title: Shared Knowledge and the Coagglomeration of Occupations

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2013

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Abstract: ...As a natural extension to this research, this paper provides what we believe is the first empirical analysis of the extent to which people in different occupations locate near one another, or what we term occupational coagglomeration.1 To do so, we present and examine measures of the coagglomeration of U.S. occupations at the state and metropolitan area levels. Importantly, our analysis covers the full spectrum of the U.S. economy. By contrast, most empirical studies of industry agglomeration focus on the manufacturing sector (Barrios et al., 2004; Devereux, Griffith, and Simpson, 2004; Duranton and Overman, 2005; Ellison, Glaeser, and Kerr, 2010), which accounts for less than ten percent of U.S. employment. Kolko (2010) broadened the analysis of industry concentration to include the service sector, which revealed some interesting differences in the patterns of industry location. Thus, to fully capture the geographic concentration of economic activity, it is important to move beyond specific sectors of the economy.We then turn our attention to identifying factors underlying the patterns of occupational coagglomeration that are identified, with a focus on the importance of the similarity of knowledge required to perform a job. Reorienting the focus from industries to occupations changes the way that we think about the determinants of agglomeration. Industries are defined along the basis of what firms make (e.g., good or service produced), while occupations are organized by what people do (e.g., skills and knowledge requirements) in their jobs (Feser, 2003). This means that, for example, whereas input-output relationshipscharacterizing the amount of one good needed to produce anothermight influence the settlement patterns of some firms, this determinant of industry agglomeration is less relevant to the study of occupations. Less constrained by production relationships that dictate how things are made, people are apt to locate around others involved in the same types of work activities (e.g., computer programming), thinking less about whether their peers are employed by companies making similar or different types of goods and services. Thus, we expect occupations with similar knowledge profiles to exhibit strong patterns of coagglomeration....

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Authors: Gabe, Todd M.; Abel, Jaison R.

Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report 612

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration

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