Analysis of the a s revealed that manufacturing and WRT differed statistically in seven regions from that of the nation. This is in accordance with the anecdotal evidence regarding the relative weakness of the current economic recovery in the Northeast. Similarly, most accounts indicate that the Midwest, Mountain region and South have experienced strong growth in recent years. In this paper, I wanted to develop a quantifiable measure of the volatility of sectoral employment trends relative to overall employment trends. Furthermore, I wanted to investigate the hypothesis whether these trends were similar regionally and nationally.
Beta analysis provides such a measure.
Estimates for all sectors considered were obtained for the United States and its regions. To address the second objective, the appropriate statistical tests were performed. The findings indicated that for some sectors the underlying growth trends and volatilities differed in particular regions from those of the nation. This technique opens up several new lines of research. Future research can examine the optimality of current strategies.