This paper focuses on a much cited but seldom measured micro-foundation for agglomerations: inter-firm labor mobility. Labor mobility has been advanced as a vehicle for knowledge flows and labor market efficiency, and is often maintained to be an important source of agglomeration economies....

I analyze the effects of sub-city level density of economic activity on worker productivity. Using a geocoded dataset on employment and wages in the city areas of Sweden, the analysis is based on squares representing “neighborhoods” (0.0625 km2), “districts” (1 km2), and...

It is a well known fact that wages have a tendency to be higher in larger regions. The source of the regional difference in wages between larger and smaller areas can be broadly divided into two parts. The first part can be attributed to the fact that regions have different industrial...

Do agglomerations stimulate productivity? An extensive literature on agglomeration economies, or urban increasing returns, has analyzed this question with aggregated spatial data. This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and productivity at the firm level using static and...

Human capital is observed to be an important contributor to growth but unevenly distributed geographically. While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human...

A major characteristic of the economic development in European and North America during the past 10-15 years is a fast expansion of the producer-service sector. This paper considers the location dynamics of two categories of firms: contact-intensive producer-service suppliers and other firms,...

Where do musicians locate, and why do creative industries such as music continue to cluster? This paper analyzes the economic geography of musicians and the recording industry in the U.S. from 1970 to 2000 to shed light on the locational dynamics of music and creative industries more broadly. We...

The paper focuses on challenges and potentials for policy in the presence of fundamental change processes that influence the long-term evolution of regions. The perspective in the paper implies that policy can be viewed as ‘management of change’. We present a conceptual model for...

The importance of metropolitan regions as national growth and development engines, and in particular as driving forces in national as well as global innovation processes is well recognized. This paper highlights the role of metropolitan regions in different contexts in order to lay a foundation...

This paper reassesses the relationship between density and productivity by using detailed geo-coded data on wages and employment in Sweden. The contribution is empirical and builds on an analysis of spatial units of exactly the same size in terms of geographic surface. The data divide Sweden...