Rejoinder: High-Tech Rankings, Specialization, and Relationship to Growth

Our respondents—Cortright and Mayer (2004 [this issue]), Gottlieb (2004 [this issue]), and Mathur (2004 [this issue])—greatly enrich the debate over high-tech rankings, relationship to growth, and specialization. We are grateful to them both for the questions they raise about our work and for the depth of critique they bring to thediscussion. All three responses, in particular Gottlieb’s, continue our methodological debate, providing valuable insights for both theory and practice. Mathur inspires us to look more deeply at the relationship between high tech and job growth as well as our definition of human capital. We find Cortright and Mayer’s views on specialization particularly provocative and Gottlieb’s framing of that issue in terms of urbanization and localization economies very useful. The following response takes up these three issues in turn.