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Neffke, Frank

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Neffke

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Neffke, Frank
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.b7c8382e-3650-4a25-a927-83e4ed99ec42

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    Evaluating the Principle of Relatedness: Estimation, Drivers and Implications for Policy
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2023-03) Li, Yang; Neffke, Frank
    A growing body of research documents that the size and growth of an industry in a place depends on how much related activity is found there. This fact is commonly referred to as the "principle of relatedness." However, there is no consensus on why we observe the principle of relatedness, how best to determine which industries are related or how this empirical regularity can help inform local industrial policy. We perform a structured search over tens of thousands of specifications to identify robust – in terms of out-of-sample predictions – ways to determine how well industries fit the local economies of US cities. To do so, we use data that allow us to derive relatedness from observing which industries co-occur in the portfolios of establishments, firms, cities and countries. Different portfolios yield different relatedness matrices, each of which help predict the size and growth of local industries. However, our specification search not only identifes ways to improve the performance of such predictions, but also reveals new facts about the principle of relatedness and important trade-offs between predictive performance and interpretability of relatedness patterns. We use these insights to deepen our theoretical understanding of what underlies path-dependent development in cities and expand existing policy frameworks that rely on inter-industry relatedness analysis.
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    Agglomeration Economies: The Heterogeneous Contribution of Human Capital and Value Chains
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-08) Diodato, Dario; Neffke, Frank; O’Clery, Neave
    We document the heterogeneity across sectors in the impact labor and input-output links have on industry agglomeration. Exploiting the available degrees of freedom in coagglomeration patterns, we estimate the industry-speci c benefi ts of sharing labor needs and supply links with local rms. On aggregate, coagglomeration patterns of services are at least as strongly driven by input-output linkages as those of manufacturing, whereas labor linkages are much more potent drivers of coagglomeration in services than in manufacturing. Moreover, the degree to which labor and input-output linkages are reflected in an industry's coagglomeration patterns is relevant for predicting patterns of city-industry employment growth.
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    Knowledge Diffusion in the Network of International Business Travel
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2020-08-10) Coscia, Michele; Neffke, Frank; Hausmann, Ricardo
    We use aggregated and anonymized information based on international expenditures through corporate payment cards to map the network of global business travel. We combine this network with information on the industrial composition and export baskets of national economies. The business travel network helps predict which economic activities will grow in a country, which new activities will develop and which old activities will be abandoned. In statistical terms, business travel has the most significant impact among a range of bilateral relations between countries, such as trade, foreign direct investments and migration. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this impact is causal: business travel from countries specializing in a specific industry causes growth in that economic activity in the destination country. Our interpretation of this is that business travel helps diffuse knowledge and we use our estimates to assess which countries contribute or benefit most from the knowledge diffusion through global business travel.
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    Agents of Structural Change
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2014-12) Neffke, Frank; Hartog, Matté; Boschma, Ron; Henning, Martin
    Who introduces structural change in regional economies: Entrepreneurs or existing firms? And do local or non‐local founders of establishments create most novelty in a region? Using matched employer-employee data for the whole Swedish workforce, we determine how unrelated and therefore how novel the activities of different establishments are to a region’s industry mix. Up‐ and downsizing establishments cause large shifts in the local industry structure, but these shifts only occasionally require an expansion of local capabilities because the new activities are often related to existing local activities. Indeed, these incumbents tend to align their production with the local economy, deepening the region’s specialization. In contrast, structural change mostly originates via new establishments, especially those with non‐local roots. Moreover, although entrepreneurs start businesses more often in activities unrelated to the existing regional economy, new establishments founded by existing firms survive in such activities more often, inducing longer‐lasting changes in the region.
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    The Workforce of Pioneer Plants
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-01) Hausmann, Ricardo; Neffke, Frank
    Is labor mobility important in technological diffusion? We address this question by asking how plants assemble their workforce if they are industry pioneers in a location. By definition, these plants cannot hire local workers with industry experience. Using German social-security data, we find that such plants recruit workers from related industries from more distant regions and local workers from less-related industries. We also show that pioneers leverage a low-cost advantage in unskilled labor to compete with plants that are located in areas where the industry is more prevalent. Finally, whereas research on German reunification has often focused on the effects of east-west migration, we show that the opposite migration facilitated the industrial diversification of eastern Germany by giving access to experienced workers from western Germany.
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    Is Our Human Capital General Enough to Withstand the Current Wave of Technological Change?
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2018-08) Nedelkoska, Ljubica; Diodato, Dario; Neffke, Frank
    The degree to which modern technologies are able to substitute for groups of job tasks has renewed fears of near-future technological unemployment. We argue that our knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA) go beyond the specific tasks we do at the job, making us potentially more adaptable to technological change than feared. The disruptiveness of new technologies depends on the relationships between the job tasks susceptible to automation and our KSA. Here we first demonstrate that KSA are general human capital features while job tasks are not, suggesting that human capital is more transferrable across occupations than what job tasks would predict. In spite of this, we document a worrying pattern where automation is not randomly distributed across the KSA space – it is concentrated among occupations that share similar KSA. As a result, workers in these occupations are making longer skill transitions when changing occupations and have higher probability of unemployment.
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    Report on the Poblacion Flotante of Bogota
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2015-12) Coscia, Michele; Neffke, Frank; Lora, Eduardo
    In this document we describe the size of the Poblacion Flotante of Bogota (D.C.). The Poblacion Flotante is composed by people who live outside Bogota (D.C.), but who rely on the city for performing their job. We estimate the Poblacion Flotante impact relying on a new data source provided by telecommunications operators in Colombia, which enables us to estimate how many people commute daily from every municipality of Colombia to a specifi c area of Bogota (D.C.). We estimate that the size of the Poblacion Flotante could represent a 5.4% increase of Bogota (D.C.)'s population. During weekdays, the commuters tend to visit the city center more.
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    From Products to Capabilities: Constructing a Genotypic Product Space
    (Growth Lab, 2024-06) Schetter, Ulrich; Diodato, Dario; Porter, Eric; Neffke, Frank; Hausmann, Ricardo
    Economic development is a path-dependent process in which countries accumulate capabilities that allow them to move into more complex products and industries. Inspired by a theory of capabilities that explains which countries produce which products, these diversification dynamics have been studied in great detail in the literature on economic complexity analysis. However, so far, these capabilities have remained latent and inference is drawn from product spaces that reflect economic outcomes: which products are often exported in tandem. Borrowing a metaphor from biology, such analysis remains phenotypic in nature. In this paper we develop a methodology that allows economic complexity analysis to use capabilities directly. To do so, we interpret the capability requirements of industries as a genetic code that shows how capabilities map onto products. We apply this framework to construct a genotypic product space and to infer countries’ capability bases. These constructs can be used to determine which capabilities a country would still need to acquire if it were to diversify into a given industry. We show that this information is not just valuable in predicting future diversification paths and to advance our understanding of economic development, but also to design more concrete policy interventions that go beyond targeting products by identifying the underlying capability requirements.
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    The Mobility of Displaced Workers: How the Local Industry Mix Affects Job Search Strategies
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-03) Neffke, Frank; Otto, Anne; Hidalgo, Cesar
    Establishment closures leave many workers unemployed. Based on employment histories of 20 million German workers, we find that workers often cope with their displacement by moving to different regions and industries. However, which of these coping strategies is chosen depends on the local industry mix. A large local presence of predisplacement or related industries strongly reduces the rate at which workers leave the region. Moreover, our findings suggest that a large local presence of the predisplacement industry induces workers to shift search efforts toward this industry, reducing the spatial scope of search for jobs in alternative industries and vice versa.
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    Inter-industry Labor Flows
    (Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-03) Neffke, Frank; Otto, Anne; Weyh, Antje
    Labor flows across industries reallocate resources and diffuse knowledge among economic activities. However, surprisingly little is known about the structure of such inter-industry flows. How freely do workers switch jobs among industries? Between which pairs of industries do we observe such switches? Do different types of workers have different transition matrices? Do these matrices change over time? Using German social security data, we generate stylized facts about inter-industry labor mobility and explore its consequences. We find that workers switch industries along tight paths that link industries in a sparse network. This labor-flow network is relatively stable over time, similar for workers in different occupations and wage categories and independent of whether workers move locally or over larger distances. When using these networks to construct inter-industry relatedness measures they prove better predictors of local industry growth rates than co-location or input-based alternatives. However, because industries that exchange much labor typically do not have correlated growth paths, the sparseness of the labor-flow network does not necessarily prevent a smooth reallocation of workers from shrinking to growing industries. To facilitate future research, the inter-industry relatedness matrices we develop are made available as an online appendix to this paper.