A SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF CREATIVE CLASS WORKER GROWTH CONVERGENCE IN US COUNTIES

The Creative Class Workers (CCWs), a special group of human capital, are not uniformly distributed across geographic locations. The CCWs are the most innovative and dynamic group of human capital and play important role in regional economic growth. Therefore, it is important to understand the distribution of CCW growth across regions and time. This study examines the CCWs growth convergence of CCWs across US counties. Due to the spatial autocorrelation, the conditional spatial error model turns out to be the best fit model to examine the beta-convergence. The conditional spatial error model estimates about 58 years required to cover the gap of CCWs growth among the US counties. Due to spatial autocorrelation, the neighboring counties help shorten the convergence by 19.8 years. The result also finds evidence of sigma-convergence but not in all RuralUrban Continuum Code (RUCC) county groups. The beta-convergence analysis by RUCC groups shows different convergence rates.