IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2410.06971.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Industrial complexity and the evolution of formal employment in developing cities

Author

Listed:
  • Neave O'Clery
  • Juan Chaparro
  • Andres Gomez-Lievano
  • Eduardo Lora

Abstract

What drives formal employment creation in developing cities? We find that larger cities, home to an abundant set of complex industries, employ a larger share of their working age population in formal jobs. We propose a hypothesis to explain this pattern, arguing that it is the organised nature of formal firms, whereby workers with complementary skills are coordinated in teams, that enables larger cities to create more formal employment. From this perspective, the growth of formal employment is dependent on the ability of a city to build on existing skills to enter new complex industries. To test our hypothesis, we construct a variable which captures the skill-proximity of cities' current industrial base to new complex industries, termed 'complexity potential'. Our main result is that complexity potential is robustly associated with subsequent growth of the formal employment rate in Colombian cities.

Suggested Citation

  • Neave O'Clery & Juan Chaparro & Andres Gomez-Lievano & Eduardo Lora, 2024. "Industrial complexity and the evolution of formal employment in developing cities," Papers 2410.06971, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2410.06971
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.06971
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2410.06971. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.