An Empirical Analysis on the Geography of Korea's High-Tech Jobs and Start-Ups

Abstract

Active creation of high tech jobs and start-ups in innovation clusters like Silicon Valley has drawn a lot of attentions from policy makers and analysts around the world. We empirically investigate the geography of Korea’s high tech jobs and start-ups using the combined data set of Korea’s Local Area Labor Force Survey and Survey of Research and Development in Korea. Although we identified significantly positive agglomeration effects through the evidence on higher wages and bigger probability of start-ups in locations with more highly educated people, we could not find the existence of innovation clusters with active technology transfers from universities and public R&D expenditures in Korea.