Industrial diversity and metropolitan unemployment rate

The main goal of our study is to evaluate whether or not industrial diversity helps reduce the frictional unemployment rate of a metropolitan area. We used a data set from Japan’s 118 metropolitan areas. Our analysis shows that although industrial diversity might reduce the frictional unemployment rate of a metropolitan area, its effect is not statistically significant in our model. Second, the location quotient for industries, considered to be related to types of unemployment other than frictional, has a stronger impact on unemployment rate than industrial diversity does. In particular, it was found that the location quotients for both the manufacturing and the construction industry have a negative relationship with the unemployment rate of a metropolitan area. We also discovered that the higher the percentage of graduates of post-secondary institutions there are in a metropolitan area, the lower its unemployment rate will be.