Productivity, Place, and Plants

Benjamin Schoefer and Oren Ziv

No 8843, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Why do cities differ so much in productivity? A long literature has sought out systematic sources, such as inherent productivity advantages, market access, agglomeration forces, or sorting. We document that up to three quarters of the measured regional productivity dispersion is spurious, reflecting the “luck of the draw” of finite counts of idiosyncratically heterogeneous plants that happen to operate in a given location. The patterns are even more pronounced for new plants, hold for alternative productivity measures, and broadly extend to European countries. This large role for individual plants suggests a smaller role for places in driving regional differences.

Keywords: productivity; urban economics; firm heterogeneity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8843.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Productivity, Place, and Plants (2024)
Working Paper: Productivity, Place, and Plants (2022)
Working Paper: Productivity, Place, and Plants (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8843

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().