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Abstract
The problems of industrial retention and renewal in the industrial cities of the northeast and midwest has fostered the adoption of various approaches to local economic development policy since the mid-1970s. In recent years, the approach has increasingly emphasized human capital approaches such as job training, job preparedness, education and other labor-force-based economic development strategies which suggests that development efforts be built around a match between potential industrial targets and the existing skills of the local labor force.
However, the inherent assumption in human capital or labor-force-based development strategies is that the strengths of a local labor market can be used to build an industrial foundation. That is, that firms themselves recognize labor as spatially segmented and will locate in a way to seek out specific labor pools. An expanding body of both theory and empirical evidence does support the notion that firms will locate in order to seek out a particular, local labor pool, and that these pools are differentiated by gender, ethnicity and skills.
Using both a firm survey and an econometric model, this dissertation looks at the evidence for labor force characteristics in the site choices of branch plants in the Chicago metropolitan suburbs during the 1980s. The evidence suggests that an important consideration for the location decisions of these firms was the presence of a female, second-earner labor force.
This finding has implications not only for the efficacy of labor-based development strategies, but for what we know about the organization of internal career ladders and the decentralization of industrial activity from cities to suburbs. If firms are siting branch establishments at places remote from headquarter functions, then the internal career ladders for these companies will be truncated where the next promotion would require a commute to a different location. In addition, the evidence suggests that firms are leaving the central city not just because of suspected factors such as congestion, crime and site assembly costs, but also for labor force reasons; such reasons may be less amenable to central city development efforts.
