Relative geographic concentration of creative, other traded, and local industries using establishment data and Harvard's U.S. Cluster Mapping Benchmark Definitions

Abstract

This paper examines the relative tendency of industries and industry clusters to be geographically concentrated. Creative industries defined as having distinct artistic creation and production-distribution components are examined. This extends previous observations that creative industries exhibit a relatively high degree of geographic concentration to examine whether two-sided market dynamics contribute to this concentration. Variance in the distribution of business establishments among U.S. metro areas for 978 industries is calculated using County Business Patterns data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The data is mapped to different clusters using Harvard University's U.S. Cluster Mapping Benchmark Definitions. The average variance of each cluster is calculated to measure relative concentration.•Richard Caves’ definition of creative industries is used to identify industries characterized by a two-sided structure.•Harvard University's U.S. Cluster Mapping Benchmark Definitions are used to map creative industries to specific industry codes and industry clusters.•These two methods are applied to U.S. County Business Patterns data to examine the relative geographic concentration of two-sided creative clusters.