Resumen
In this paper, we analyze the labor productivity of ?knowledge-intensive services? (KIS) located in the four larger metropolitan areas in Mexico. We discuss the accepted explanation to why big cities concentrate the best and most qualified jobs and activities that generate innovative and technological change and therefore labor productivity. In Mexico this is the case for some knowledge-intensive sectors, but some paradoxes emerge when services are disaggregated by analytical, synthetic, and symbolic categories. We use disaggregated economic census data for 2004 and 2014 to find changes in labor productivity in those KIS sectors compared to the metropolitan service economy. In fact, we can identify different spatial logic according to the type of knowledge that KIS produce. Results show unexpected paradoxes in terms of type of KIS category viz a viz their location and growth performance in the four larger metropolitan areas.