To what extent do New Zealand firms choose to locate close to each other, and why? This paper summarises patterns of geographic concentration of firms in New Zealand between 1987 and 2003. We present a range of summary measures of own-industry concentration, and examine between-industry...

The distribution of economic activity over physical space - economic geography - is central to economic development. Geographical variations in industrialisation are the primary factor affecting geographical variations in incomes. And so, the question of what drives industry to locate in one...

How do differences in the local business environment influence location of industry within countries? How do the benefits of a good business environment compare to those from good market access and agglomeration economies from industry clustering? We examine these questions by analyzing location...

Our analysis of manufacturing plants sampled from India's major industrial centers shows large productivity gaps across cities. The gaps partly reflect differences in agglomeration economies and in market access. However, they are also explained to a greater extent by differences in the degree...

This paper analyses the location choices of new entrants to Auckland between 1996 and 2006, to identify a systematic relationship between residential location choices and features of local areas such as population density, the population composition of the area or its neighbourhood,...

This review discusses frontier topics in economic geography as they relate to firms and agglomeration economies. We focus on areas where empirical research is scarce but possible. We first outline a conceptual framework for city formation that allows us to contemplate what empiricists might...

We introduce knowledge spillovers as an externality in the production function of competitive firms operating in a finite spatial domain under adjustment costs. Spillovers are spatial as productive knowledge flows more easily among firms located nearby. When knowledge spillovers are not...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....

Are the observed spatial distributions of firms decided mostly by market-mediated, economy-wide locational forces, or rather by non-pecuniary, sector-specific ones? This work finds that the latter kind of forces weight systematically more than the former in deciding firm location. The analysis...