Labour Market Dynamics and Industrial Clusters: an Ecological Based Approach

The paper investigates the role of labour flows in determining the growth of industrial clusters (defined as a combination of industries and spatial areas). Within an ecological approach the role of inter and intra industry as well as of inter and intra cluster interactions is theoretically modelled and empirically tested. This approach is enriched with other economic perspectives in order to take into account the effect of workers’ migration flows and its skill composition. The empirical evidence shows that industry specific behaviours and territorial peculiarities are crucial in determining the employment dynamics. In particular, empirical evidence from 50 US states and 80 3-digits NAICS industries are able to show that employment flows play different role on local wages according to industrial characteristics (within services the main distinction arise between services to production and to persons); within manufacturing industries between labour intensive and capital intensive activities). A final section drawing some policy suggestion from the above analysis concludes the paper. ∗CERTeT and IEP, Università Bocconi, piazza Sraffa, 13, 20136 Milano, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]. †DISEIS and Faculty of Political Science, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, via Necchi, 5, 20126 Milano, Italy. E-mail: [email protected].