Development zones, born in the course of China’s economic transition, are the carriers of both the favorable institutions and the foreign advanced technology. They are now at the stage of transferring from the concentration of firms to being industrial clusters. Based on data of firms in...

This paper studies how information and communication technology (ICT) affects the firm geographic organization and its implications on aggregate efficiency. ICT can widen firms' geographic span of control by reducing their internal communication costs. Empirical evidence from confidential US...

While multi-establishment firms are an important part of the economy, little is known about their spatial organization. In this article, we study how the location and the occupational composition of establishments within firms has changed during the last 36 years. Using Danish administrative...

The objective of this article is to investigate the dynamics of relocations at the micro-economic level. By proposing a grid of “dynamics of proximities”, we focus on the coordination issues which seem to be missing from most of analyses carried about relocations. We apply our framework to...

This paper focuses on the functional specialisation of a system of cities, with particular attention to the role and the formation process of secondary business centers. At the European level, the latters can be identified in the large number of regional capitals, and properly defined as cities...

We document and then develop a model explaining and relating changes in firms' organisation and in urban structure. Sharing of business services by headquarters and of sector-specific intermediates by production plants within a city reduces costs, while congestion increases with city size. A...

Striking evidence is presented of a previously unremarked transformation of urban structure from mainly sectoral to mainly functional specialisation. We offer an explanation showing that this transformation is inextricably interrelated with changes in firms' organisation. A greater variety of...

Departing from research on expanding, high-technology industries, we study the impact of agglomeration in a declining, low-technology industry. The setting is U.S. footwear manufacturing between 1975 and 1991, when import competition rendered local support critical for survival. We examine how...

This paper focuses on the functional specialisation of a system of cities, with particular attention to the role and the formation process of secondary business centers.At the European level, the latters can be identified in the large number of regional capitals, and properly defined as cities...