Explicit and tacit knowledge have diverging urban growth patterns

Abstract

This article utilizes an online job recruitment dataset of more than 4.6 million jobs in China to examine the urban scaling patterns of explicit and tacit knowledge. Knowledge complexity is considered essential for economic development and innovation, and recent studies find complex economic activities of many fields concentrate more in large cities. However, it remains unclear whether the urban concentration tendency would differ by explicit and tacit knowledge, given the latter is often argued as the hard core knowledge more difficult to transfer. We measure explicit/tacit knowledge in job descriptions regarding education/experience requirements. Our analysis reveals that knowledge of different natures differs to a great extent in their property of urban concentration. Specifically, jobs requiring greater explicit knowledge show higher urban scaling rates. This, however, is not true for tacit knowledge, as it demonstrates the exact opposite pattern. Our findings suggest that while cities are centers of knowledge and innovation, the engines of continued growth tend to become more biased towards explicit rather than know-how knowledge.