We examine variation in the concentration of inventive activity across 72 of North America's most highly innovative locations. In 12 of these areas, innovation is particularly concentrated in a single, large firm; we refer to such locations as "company towns.'' We find that inventors employed by...

Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully foster them. We describe the...

Managers of private entrepreneurial firms face obstacles in raising capital both in placing a value on a firm and conveying value to investors. These problems are exacerbated when the firm is small, has limited assets (except for human capital) and has yet to have a lead product. In such cases...

Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being 'snakes' and 'spiders'. Snakes are...

The explosion of multinational activities in recent decades is rapidly transforming the global landscape of industrial production. But are the emerging clusters of multinational production the rule or the exception? What drives the offshore agglomeration of multinational firms in comparison to...

Poor countries must specialize in standardized. labor-intensive commodities. Middle income countries may have a richer menu of options available to them if their labor force is reasonably well-educated and skilled. This paper is motivated by the possibility that there may exist multiple...

The main purpose of this study is to characterize and analyze high technology industrial firms in Israel. We are able to advance beyond previous empirical studies of high technology because we have access to a unique individual firm data set, a sample of 670 establishments in Israel for the year...