What creates growth in a local economy? Theories in the 1980s brought to the policy arena the revolutionary concept that knowledge (i.e., a city's stock of ideas), rather than labor and physical capital, is the prime engine of economic growth, associating local economic development with the...

Recent theories of economic development view learning processes associated with knowledge externalities as the engines of economic growth. As suggested by Marshall (1920), entrepreneurs congregate next to one another to learn from each other. However, cities may differ in the generation and...

The literature on the relationship between city size and urban wages argues that productivity and wages are higher in larger cities. Indeed, a doubling of city size is associated with a 4-8 per cent increase in wages. The human capital externalities literature finds evidence of higher wages in...