Labour and control shifts: financial services in US metro areas, 2007-17

We use a triangulation approach combining data on mergers and acquisitions and the labour market with 66 interviews to tease out a decade of changes (2007-17) in corporate control and employment in financial services across 47 major US metropolitan areas. Our results show that while corporate control is rapidly shifting and concentrating within a financial-cum-technological axis of first-tier cities, which we coin the Northeastern Corridor-Bay Area axis, with New York and San Francisco in the lead, significant employment growth took place in second- and third-tier cities, such as Jacksonville, Florida, signalling a changing spatial division of labour in US finance.