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Characteristics of regional industry‐specific employment growth rates' distributions
Author(s) -
Duschl Matthias,
Brenner Thomas
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
papers in regional science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.937
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1435-5957
pISSN - 1056-8190
DOI - 10.1111/pirs.12011
Subject(s) - distribution (mathematics) , economic geography , economics , german , explanatory power , demographic economics , econometrics , geography , mathematical analysis , philosophy , mathematics , archaeology , epistemology
Regional growth dynamics deviate from a normal distribution. Using industry‐specific employment data for German regions, we find that the asymmetric exponential power distribution best accounts for the high frequency of extreme positive and especially negative growth events. This research confirms previous studies on growth rates of firms, industries and countries and fills the research gap at the level of regions. Furthermore, we show that even in the case of prolonged time lags, regional industry‐specific employment growth rates are far from being normally distributed, move towards a Laplacian shape and that knowledge intensive industries increase the regional economies' risk of being affected by extreme events of growth and decline.