  We propose a statistical framework to quantify location and co-location
associations of economic activities using information-theoretic measures. We
relate the resulting measures to existing measures of revealed comparative
advantage, localization and specialization and show that they can all be seen
as part of the same framework. Using a Bayesian approach, we provide measures
of uncertainty of the estimated quantities. Furthermore, the
information-theoretic approach can be readily extended to move beyond pairwise
co-locations and instead capture multivariate associations. To illustrate the
framework, we apply our measures to the co-location of occupations in US
cities, showing the associations between different groups of occupations.
