This paper examines the relationships between several aspects of regional industrial structure and employment change in the United States manufacturing sector and 19 subsectors from 1987 to 1997. Economic diversity, industrial specialization, and competitive structure are considered together in a non-causal regression framework in order to assess their relative associations with economic performance. The innovative features of the research are considering together multiple distinct facets of industrial structure at the regional scale, emphasizing the less commonly studied characteristic of industrial competitive structure, and exploiting confidential microdata to construct and evaluate detailed metrics across broad geographic and industrial ranges. The findings suggest the importance of industrial competitive structure for understanding employment change, economic performance, and industrial development at the regional scale.

Publication link: https://rsa.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00343404.2013.837874?af=R.