Impacts of Skill Centrality on Regional Economic Productivity and Occupational Income

Keith Waters, Shade T. Shutters and Guilherme Ferraz de Arruda

Complexity, 2022, vol. 2022, 1-7

Abstract: A well-developed perspective in the study of urban systems is that cities are complex systems that manifest as networks of interdependent economic units. These units might be occupations, industries, labor skills, patent technologies, etc. Much research has focused on describing the nature of these networks, quantifying their links, and suggesting applications for policymakers. In this paper, we examine the US skill network, focusing on the relationship between network centrality and economic performance. Here, nodes are represented by individual labor skills, and edge weights are derived from the colocation pattern of skill pairs among 384 US metropolitan statistical areas. The centrality of skills, using three centrality measures, is then aggregated to the occupational and metropolitan level. We find that occupations with higher skill centrality are associated with greater annual salaries, and metropolitan areas with higher skill centrality have higher productivity rates. Overall, these results suggest that the application of traditional network metrics to this view of cities as complex networks can offer new insights into the dynamics of regional economies.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/2022/5820050.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/2022/5820050.xml (application/xml)

Related works:
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:hin:complx:5820050

DOI: 10.1155/2022/5820050

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Complexity from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().