Inter-industry labor flows

Frank Neffke, Anne Otto and Antje Weyh

No 1606, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: Labor flows across industries reallocate resources and diffuse knowledge among economic activities. However, surprisingly little is known about the structure of such inter-industry flows. How freely do workers switch jobs among industries? Between which pairs of industries do we observe such switches? Do different types of workers have different transition matrices? Do these matrices change over time? Using German social security data, we generate stylized facts about inter-industry labor mobility and explore its consequences. We find that workers switch industries along tight paths that link industries in a sparse network. This labor-flow network is relatively stable over time, similar for workers in different occupations and wage categories and independent of whether workers move locally or over larger distances. When using these networks to construct inter-industry relatedness measures they prove better predictors of local industry growth rates than co-location or input-based alternatives. However, because industries that exchange much labor typically do not have correlated growth paths, the sparseness of the labor-flow network does not necessarily prevent a smooth reallocation of workers from shrinking to growing industries. To facilitate future research, the inter-industry relatedness matrices we develop are made available as an online appendix to this paper.

Keywords: labor mobility; relatedness; skills; regional growth; Germany; human capital specificity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-04, Revised 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tid
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Inter-industry labor flows (2017)
Working Paper: Inter-industry Labor Flows (2016)
Working Paper: Inter-industry Labor Flows (2016)
Working Paper: Inter-industry labor flows (2016)
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