The workforce of pioneer plants

Ricardo Hausmann and Frank Neffke

No 1603, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: Is labor mobility important in technological diffusion? We address this question by asking how plants assemble their workforce if they are industry pioneers in a location. By definition, these plants cannot hire local workers with industry experience. Using German social-security data, we find that such plants recruit workers from related industries from more distant regions and local workers from less-related industries. We also show that pioneers leverage a low-cost advantage in unskilled labor to compete with plants that are located in areas where the industry is more prevalent. Finally, whereas research on German reunication has often focused on the effects of east-west migration, we show that the opposite migration facilitated the industrial diversification of eastern Germany by giving access to experienced workers from western Germany.

Keywords: diversification; technological diffusion; local labor markets; industry-specific human; capital; mobility; clusters; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 J24 M13 M50 O15 O33 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-02, Revised 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1603.pdf Version February 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The workforce of pioneer plants (2019)
Working Paper: The Workforce of Pioneer Plants (2016)
Working Paper: The Workforce of Pioneer Plants (2016)
Working Paper: The Workforce of Pioneer Plants (2016)
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:egu:wpaper:1603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).