Do Northeast Ohio’s Drivers Derive Competitive Advantage from Shared Labor?

Hill and Brennan, in an article in this issue, find statistical evidence of competitive industry clusters in the Cleveland-Akron Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) on the basis of buy-sell relationships. Several driver industries in the CMSA emerged (the driver industries in the CMSA are those around which other industries cluster due to competitive advantage). In this article, the author considers whether the CMSA’s driver industries also are here due to agglomeration economies in shared labor, that is, whether the drivers also derive competitive advantage from labor market externalities. For this purpose, she uses the cluster discriminant method explained by Hill and Brennan. The results of the analysis suggest that although the Cleveland-Akron CMSA’s driver industries do enjoy agglomeration economies in shared labor, shared labor is not a source of competitive advantage and does not explain why these industries are drivers in the region. In this article, the author considers two possible explanations.