Creative professionals and high-skilled agents: Polarization of employment growth?

Jan Wedemeier (matena@uni-bremen.de)

No 119, HWWI Research Papers from Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI)

Abstract: The creative sector is frequently regarded as one of the driving forces of total employment growth. Empirical studies suggest that the clustering of human capital might result in the polarization of employment growth. Since the creative sector's definition is motivated from the insights of the economics of human capital, this effect might also be relevant to the creative sector. Following these ideas, the objective of the present paper is to analyze the impact of the creative sector on total employment and on creative sector's employment growth in Western Germany's regions from 1977 to 2004. For the analysis, the definitions of the creative sector follow a technologically and culturally oriented definition and, alternatively, Florida's creative class (2002). These approaches focusing on human capital are contrasted with a skill-based approach. Using a fixed-effects panel model with time lags, I find evidence that the creative sector fosters the regional growth rate of total employment. The results show, moreover, that an initially large share of regional creative professionals pushes further the regional concentration of those professions in agglomerated regions. Driving force for the concentration of creative professionals are local amenities, measured by bohemians, and it is assumed that knowledge spillovers - possibly accelerated by the diversified composition of employment - contribute to this polarization. These results are as well confirmed for the high-skilled agents.

Keywords: regional employment growth; creative sector; human capital; bohemians; externalities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J24 R11 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-geo, nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/55835/1/687954673.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Creative professionals and high-skilled agents': Polarization of employment growth? (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:hwwirp:119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HWWI Research Papers from Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).