This paper examines the agglomeration effects of multinational firms on the location decisions of first-time Japanese manufacturing investors in China for the period 1995–2007. This is accomplished by exploiting newly constructed measures of inter-firm backward and forward linkages formed in a...

In this chapter we discuss the empirical representation of agglomeration economies, with a focus on the potential of production theory-based econometric models to analyze the productive impacts of such externalities. In particular, we overview the use of production theory models and measures to...

Can increasing returns to scale in search explain regional differentiation between cities and rural areas? To answer this question, we develop a model of an economy that consists of several regions. Within each region, jobs and workers are heterogeneous by respectively skill and job complexity...

This paper examines labour productivity in Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, using microdata from Statistics New Zealand's Prototype Longitudinal Business Database. It documents a sizeable productivity premium in Auckland, around half of which is due to industry composition. There is a cross...

In this paper we study how the use of resources in the public sector affects industrial structure, the size and the productivity in knowledge-intensive clusters in local communities. We also discuss how these considerations should be implemented in costbenefit assessments of local public goods...

The recent dismal performance of overall job creation has left Italy, as of the end of the 90's, with very low participation and high unemployment rates. Moreover, Italy exhibits a large regional dispersion of those variables when compared to similar European Union economies. The present paper,...

A two-region economy consists of a given but different number of immobile workers in each region, and a given number of mobile firms. Firms create jobs where they locate, but there is frictional unemployment. Two sorts of agglomeration effects arise: those from economies of scale in matching,...

This study examines the location of manufacturing foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States, focusing on taxes and incentives relative to agglomeration as determinants. Using a panel Poisson regression with random effects, we model the probability of site selection in U.S. states and...

This chapter examines the link between firm productivity and the population composition of the areas in which firms operate. We combine annual firm-level microdata on production, covering a large proportion of the New Zealand economy, with area-level workforce characteristics obtained from...

This paper analyses empirically how differences in local taxes affect the intraregional location of new manufacturing plants. These effects are examined within the random profit maximization framework while accounting for the presence of different types of agglomeration economies (localization/...