New Yorkers are more likely to work in its stock and commodity exchanges, while Oregonians are more likely to work in the fishing industry than Americans overall.
Business Insider put together the following map, showing for each state the industry with the most outsize share of employment, relative to the national baseline. (We'll explain what that means below.)
The data comes from the Census Bureau's just-released 2012 County Business Patterns, an incredibly comprehensive collection of information on the number and size of businesses in the U.S. The map shows the industries that have most disproportionate number of employees in each state, as explained in detail below.
Here's each state's most distinctive industry:
Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from U.S. Census Bureau
These are not the largest industries in each state, but instead industries that have a disproportionately large share of employment, compared to the national norm. For example, in West Virginia, there were 24,075 people employed by the coal mining industry, out of 579,583 total employed. So, about 415 out of every 10,000 jobs in West Virginia were in this industry.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. as a whole, there were 89,367 people in the coal mining industry out of 115,938,468 total employed people, so for the U.S., only 7.7 out of every 10,000 jobs are in the coal mining industry.
The location quotient for the coal mining industry in West Virginia is defined as the ratio of those two rates: 415/7.7, which gives about 53.9. In other words, there are about 53.9 times as many jobs in the coal mining industry per 10,000 total jobs in West Virginia than there are in the United States overall.
The map shows the industry (adapted from 4-digit NAICS codes for the census data lovers out there) with the highest location quotient in each state.