Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

3-1986

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Economics

Major Professor

Henry W. Herzog

Abstract

New technologies are having a widespread impact on work in the office, the factory and the farm. New job skills are emerging and some old ones are becoming obsolete. Employment in high technology industries rose almost 40 percent between 1972 and 1982, almost twice the growth of total U.S. employment. Despite the attention that has been directed to the desirability of attracting high technology industries, until recently very little was known about the locational orientation of high technology firms. Most analysts agree that the major factor influencing the location decisions of high technology firms is the availability of an adequate supply of workers in high technology occupations. Many of these analysts also hypothesize that high technology workers are attracted to metropolitan areas that offer quality of life advantages. This implies that, other things equal, the ability of metropolitan areas to attract high technology firms is dependent on their ability to attract and retain high technology workers. Thus, metropolitan areas which offer a relatively high quality of life should attract high technology firms. If this is true, then the location decisions of high technology firms are amenity-oriented because the location decisions of workers are amenity-oriented.

This study examines the migration decisions of high technology workers in order to determine if they are indeed attracted to metropolitan areas that offer quality of life advantages. An economic model of migration is formulated. This model is expanded to incorporate the metropolitan area characteristics hypothesized to influence the migration decisions of high technology workers. This model is econometrically estimated with micro-data from the 1980 Census of Population and Housing.

The main conclusion is that quality of life considerations play only a minor role in the migration decisions of high technology workers. The higher migration rate of high technology workers can be attributed either to occupation-related differences in such personal attributes as age, education, prior migration experience, marital status, and race or to explanatory variables not included in the model. The empirical results of this study do not support the hypothesis that the location decisions of high technology firms are amenity-oriented.

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