Doctoral Disseratation Research in Geography and Regional Science

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Abstract Narrative Professor Scott and doctoral student Angel will gather detailed data on production and employment from individual firms and workers in the U.S. semiconductor industry, by means of questionnaires and personal interviews. Particular attention will be devoted to questions of job matching, job turnover, and the inter-firm mobility of skilled and unskilled segments of the semiconductor labor force. The purpose of this research is to determine how local labor markets are organized in the U.S. semiconductor industry, and in particular, the ways in which the organization and operations of local labor markets produce external economies of scale that cause and sustain the agglomeration of the industry in regions of concentration, especially in Santa Clara County, California. The project will also produce insights into the ways firms select dispersed locations in small, often non-metropolitan labor markets for some of their production. Understanding the locational dynamics of high-tech industries such as semiconductors is important from the standpoint of industrial location theory as well as from the perspective of national and international economic and industrial policy. Professor Scott's previous research has made major contributions to location theory, and this research promises to yield additional insights along similar lines.