Staying for Opportunity: Industry Trajectories as Place-Based Stratification

Abstract

Local governments in the U.S. are increasingly diversifying the industries in theirarea. This push is in response to many of the problems brought by the specializations in the recent past. Concentration into private industries wrought many problems for locals, including lower wages and difficulty retaining residents. Concentration, once seen as a foundation, is now partly to blame for the stagnated growth of many of the mid-sized and smaller towns in the U.S. In this dissertation, I examine the trajecto- ries of industry composition to improve our understanding of how the transition to varied industry arrangements comes about and, more importantly, how they impact residents. I contribute to a growing body of literature on the spatial distribution of local economic arrangements by highlighting the place of industry–what we do, with outcomes–how we are. In the first paper, I build a typology of industry trajectories. I constructed a data-driven strategy for assessing the transitions between primary industries over the past forty years. The typology uncovers the simultaneity of industry composition and particular work characteristics to allow for a unified language for comparing deindustrialized Rust Belt towns to the emerging tech towns of the West Coast. In the second, I apply this typology as a pathway to understanding the wages of service sector workers. The wages in the service industry are spatially distributed, and I test how much this distribution is tied to work trajectories. In other words, were some labor markets primed to manage a national shift to service work? And are those prime markets giving higher wages? I find evidence that places with a history of service work have modest wage gains compared to their counterparts in other industry trajectories. In the final paper, I examine this question of population growth by assessing recent changes to internal migration due to the push for diversifying the industries in a local labor market. I find that economic diversification may be one of the few factors promoting internal migration in the U.S. amid slowing rates for the past few decades.