Characteristics of Regional Industry-specific Employment Growth – Empirical Evidence for Germany

Regional growth dynamics significantly deviate from a normal process. Using industry-specific employment data for German regions, we find that the asymmetric Subbotin distribution is able to account properly for extreme positive and especially negative growth events. This result confirms previous studies on growth rates of firms and countries and fills an important research gap at the meso-level of regions. Furthermore, we show that regional growth patterns emerge to a considerable degree from the aggregation of micro-level firm growth rates distributions and that the knowledge intensity of the respective industries increases the regions’ risk of being effected by extreme growth events.