Minnesota is special in many dimensions. The residents will tell you about 14,000+ lakes. The resident macroeconomists will tell you about the four horsemen. Here are two ways that Minnesota is distinctive in terms of the data describing its economic geography.
In the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) data, Minnesota is the only state that reports employment by establishment rather than firm. Graham, Kutzbach, and McKenzie (2014):
For multi-establishment employers, establishments are not assigned to jobs in the source data except for in Minnesota. The LEHD program uses an imputation model with parameters based on the Minnesota data to draw establishments for workers at multiunit employers. An establishment is more likely to be assigned to a worker when it is large and close to that worker’s residential location (based on great-circle distance between address coordinates).
In Minnesota, local government can get pretty local. For example, the mayor of Funkley, MN owns its only business: a bar that also hosts the town council meetings. In Census lingo, legally defined county subdivisions are called minor civil divisions. Minnesota has many. In 2010, the Census Bureau defined 35,703 county subdivisions in the United States. Minnesota had 2,760 of them. That’s more than any other state.