Spatial attributes mediating regional carrying capacity for office firm sectors: a stochastic frontier approach

Using stochastic frontier modeling, we examine the regional carrying capacity for office firm sectors, in the so-called COROP areas of The Netherlands. We express the concept of carrying capacity using the number of jobs in various economic sectors. Results indicate that regions can be characterized by economic sectors that have a minimum amount of jobs necessary to serve their local needs and, in most of the cases, they can serve external markets due to a surplus in the number of jobs. On the other hand, regions can also be characterized by economic sectors that support a maximum amount of jobs based on their regional specific factors. As many regions are below this frontier, it allows them to absorb external demands. Therefore, it may be that carrying capacity is not an applicable concept for all sectors and that sometimes a minimum size might be a better description. In sum, the findings delineated here can compose a base framework to simulate office firm demographic processes in line with integrated land use-transportation (LUTI) models and agent-based modeling approaches.