Speaker:

Neave O'Clery, Associate Professor, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London

Title:

The Dynamics of Formal Employment Creation in Developing Cities

Abstract:

What drives formal employment creation in developing cities? We posit that formal employment (defined as organised employment in multi-employee firms) occurs when a production activity requires the co-ordination of complementary skills. Consistent with this perspective, we find that larger cities, home to an abundant supply of diverse skills among workers, absorb a larger share of their working populations in formal employment and harbor more complex industries. We propose that the growth of formal employment is conditioned on a combinatorial process by which existing skills and capabilities evolve into new complex industrial activities. We construct a variable which captures the skill-proximity of cities' current industrial base to new complex industries, termed 'complexity potential', and show that this variable is robustly associated with subsequent growth in the formal employment rate in Colombian cities. Our results imply that policy efforts to stimulate the growth of formal employment should focus on local characteristics of labour markets to encourage the appearance and mixing of diverse productive capabilities.

Speaker Bio:

Neave O'Clery is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London where she leads a research group focused on data-driven models for economic development and the emergence of complexity for urban systems.

Professor O'Clery was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. Before this she was a Fulbright Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School following her PhD (mathematics) at Imperial College. She is also founder and Editor in Chief of Angle – a journal based at Imperial College focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and science – since 2009.

Webinar:

Zoom link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/94532487312
Passcode: nico

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

Related Info