Spatial Divisions of Labor: How Key Worker Profiles Vary for the Same Industry in Different Regions

grant through the Industry Studies Association to present this work at the 2008 meetings. We would like to thank the members of the interdisciplinary Innovation Seminar at Korea University for the opportunity to present a preliminary version of these ideas and findings in October of 2008. The human capital component of regional economies plays a subsidiary role to physical capital in most analytical and policy work, reflected in the priority given to industry over occupational structure. We theorize that the occupational structures of industries vary across regions, that the formation of the regional labor force is semi-independent of firms ’ locations, and that firms follow workers as well as vice-versa. We explore the first of these hypotheses with two exercises on the occupational variation of industry structure across regions, one using employer-based data sources for all industries and occupations among a set of California metros, and one using worker-based data (Census PUMS) fo