Demographic change is expected to affect labour markets in very different ways on a regional
scale. The objective of this paper is to explore the spatio-temporal patterns of recent
distributional changes in the workers age structure, innovation output and skill composition
for German regions by conducting an Exploratory Space-Time Data Analysis (ESTDA). Beside
commonly used tools, we apply newly developed approaches which allow investigating
the space-time dynamics of the spatial distributions. We include an analysis of the joint distributional
dynamics of the patenting variable with the remaining interest variables. Overall,
we find strong clustering tendencies for the demographic variables and innovation that constitute
a great divide across German regions. The detected clusters partly evolve over time
and suggest a demographic polarization trend among regions that may further reinforce the
observed innovation divide in the future
