Tales of the city: what do agglomeration cases tell us about agglomeration in general?

Faggio, Giulia, Silva, Olmo ORCID: 0009-0005-6918-2206 and Strange, William C. (2020) Tales of the city: what do agglomeration cases tell us about agglomeration in general? Journal of Economic Geography, 20 (5). 1117 - 1143. ISSN 1468-2702

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Abstract

This article considers the heterogeneous microfoundations of agglomeration economies. It studies the co-location of industries to look for evidence of labour pooling, input sharing and knowledge spillovers. The novel contribution of the article is that it estimates single-industry models using a common empirical framework that exploits the cross-sectional variation in how one industry co-locates with the other industries in the economy. This unified approach yields evidence on the relative importance of the Marshallian microfoundations at the single-industry level, allowing for like-for-like cross-industry comparisons on the determinants of agglomeration. Using UK data, we estimate such microfoundation models for 97 manufacturing sectors, including the classic agglomeration cases of automobiles, computers, cutlery and textiles. These four cases—as with all of the individual industry models we estimate—clearly show the importance of the Marshallian forces. However, they also highlight how the importance of these forces varies across industries—implying that extrapolation from cases should be viewed with caution. The article concludes with an investigation of the pattern of heterogeneity. The degree of an industry’s clustering (localisation), entrepreneurship, incumbent firm size and worker education are shown to contribute to the pattern of heterogeneous microfoundations.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://academic.oup.com/joeg
Additional Information:	© 2020 The Authors
Divisions:	Geography & Environment
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions
JEL classification:	R - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics > R1 - General Regional Economics > R10 - General R - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics > R1 - General Regional Economics > R12 - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade L - Industrial Organization > L5 - Regulation and Industrial Policy > L52 - Industrial Policy; Sectoral Planning Methods L - Industrial Organization > L6 - Industry Studies: Manufacturing > L60 - General
Date Deposited:	26 Feb 2020 16:42
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:04
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/103571

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