Modelling Professional Choice through Individual's Perception of Diversity in European Countries

State-of-the-art theories of regional development emphasise the roles of human capital and creative class being a fundamental driver of innovations. The spatial concentration of creative class is determined by such factors as universities, megacities, minorities acting as a sign of the lack of entry barriers. It might be assumed that the level of openness to new ideas in the society impacts the balance of professions. This research sets out to model professional choice when accounting for the individual’s perception of diversity measured through tolerance towards sexual minorities and immigrants. The data on 45 European countries was supported by EVS for 2008-2009. It was decided to distinguish 2 types of countries: high-tolerant and medium-tolerant. The estimation results brought about the hollowing-out effect caused by increases in tolerance for all the occupations compared to creative class. The effect proved higher for high-tolerant nations. Besides, the hypothesis of a town size held for creative class. In order to consider the influence of human capital on the individual’s perception of diversity the probit models were estimated for both types of tolerances. However, no evidence of a signal function of human capital was found. Moreover, the relation between spatial concentration of creative class and creative industries in Russia was also analysed with the application of location quotients using the data from RLMS-HSE, 23rd wave, 2014 and RUSLANA database. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient at 0.47 with no dependence between quotients at 5% significance level indicated that creative individuals are oftentimes employed in the companies which operate in non-creative sectors. Additionally, the hypothesis of creative class’ concentrational shift to the west was checked by the Theil index. The results revealed that the differences within the regions are more essential to explain the concentrational disparity, rather than differences between macroregions.