The major question Malecki will examine is the degree to which the labor market for technical workers affects the locational decisions made by research and development firms. He will first study the location of R&D within corporations and then survey both corporate staffs and R&D personnel to determine considerations included in the locational decision making of corporations and workers. He will then identify the degree of correspondence between the locational criteria of firms and workers. The research links two issues in the study of high-technology location: the labor market for professional and technical workers and the location of corporate facilities for which such workers are critical. The project will yield a better understanding of high-technology industry location process, and therefore of broader questions of regional growth and decline, by linking the two perspectives.
