The digital industries cluster known as 'Silicon Roundabout' has been quietly growing in East London since the 1990s. Now rebranded 'Tech City', it is now the focus of huge public and government attention. National and local policymakers wish to accelerate the local area's development: such...

In many industries broad cross-license agreements are considered a useful method to obtain freedom to operate and to avoid patent litigation. In this paper I study the previously neglected dynamic trade-off between litigating and cross-licensing that firms face to protect their intellectual...

London is one of the world’s major cities, and one of its most diverse. London’s cultural diversity is widely seen as a social asset, but there is little hard evidence on its importance for the city’s businesses. Theory and evidence suggest various links between urban cultural diversity...

Growing cultural diversity is seen as important for innovation. Research has focused on two potential mechanisms: a firm effect, with diversity at the firm level improving knowledge sourcing or ideas generation, and a city effect, where diverse cities helping firms innovate. This paper uses a...

Firms faced with the decision of whether to standardize or not prior to introducing a new network technology face a tradeoff: Compatibility improves the technology’s chances of consumer acceptance, but it also means having to share the resulting profits with other sponsors of the standard. In...

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT and digital industries. Policymakers thus need a clear sense of the size and characteristics of digital businesses, but this is hard to do with conventional datasets and industry codes. This paper uses innovative ‘big data’ resources to...

To study the detailed location patterns of industries, and particularly the tendency for industries to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localisation. In contrast to previous studies, our approach allows us to assess the statistical significance of...

To study the detailed location patterns of industries, and particularly the tendency for industries to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localisation. In contrast to previous studies, our approach allows us to assess the statistical significance of...

We use a point-pattern methodology to explore the detailed location patterns of UK manufacturing industries. In particular, we consider the location of entrants and exiters vs. continuing establishments, domestic- vs. foreign-owned, large vs. small, and affiliated vs. independent. We also...

Many prior treatments of agglomeration either explicitly or implicitly suppose that all industries agglomerate for the same reasons, with traditional Marshallian (1890) factors affecting all industries similarly. An important instance of this approach is the extrapolation of the agglomeration...