Will There Be a Concentration of Alikes? The Impact of Labor Market Structure on Industry Mix in the Presence of Product Market Shocks

We analyze determinants of regional industry mix and focus especially on the influence of labor market characteristics. By combining a labor market pooling argument with an argument involving the cost of switching a worker from one firm to another, we show that in the presence of product market shocks there exists an interesting trade-off for the concentration of firms of the same industry in one region. Firms belonging to different industries are hedged against industry-specific shocks if they settle in the same region, but face higher switching costs (retraining costs for workers moving from one firm to another). In addition, with a given supply of labor there is an additional rationing effect affecting the location decisions of firms. Against the background of these trade-offs we analyze the resulting location decisions of firms in a two-regions-two-industry-four-firm framework. We analyze the impact of different parameters on the location choice of firms.