Papers › Evaluating the principle of relatedness: Estimation, drivers and implications for policy
Evaluating the principle of relatedness: Estimation, drivers and implications for policy
Yang Li, Frank Neffke
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
A growing body of research documents that the size and growth of an industry in a place depends on how much related activity is found there. This fact is commonly referred to as the "principle of relatedness". However, there is no consensus on why we observe the principle of relatedness, how best to determine which industries are related or how this empirical regularity can help inform local industrial policy. We perform a structured search over tens of thousands of specifications to identify robust -- in terms of out-of-sample predictions -- ways to determine how well industries fit the local economies of US cities. To do so, we use data that allow us to derive relatedness from observing which industries co-occur in the portfolios of establishments, firms, cities and countries. Different portfolios yield different relatedness matrices, each of which help predict the size and growth of local industries. However, our specification search not only identifies ways to improve the performance of such predictions, but also reveals new facts about the principle of relatedness and important trade-offs between predictive performance and interpretability of relatedness patterns. We use these insights to deepen our theoretical understanding of what underlies path-dependent development in cities and expand existing policy frameworks that rely on inter-industry relatedness analysis.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections