Spill over or Spill out? - A multilevel analysis of the cluster and firm performance relationship

Nils Grashof

No 2013, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: Regional clusters have become an inseparable component of modern economies. Spurred by the idea that clusters unrestrictedly encourage firm innovativeness, such as in the lighthouse example of Silicon Valley, the cluster approach has particularly gained attention among policy makers who have supported the creation and development of clusters. Nevertheless, due to a lack of holistic consideration of different influencing variables, the scientific results about the effect of clusters on firm innovative performance are highly contradictive. For companies as well as policy makers, it is therefore still difficult to evaluate the concrete consequences of being located in a cluster. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the conditions and mechanisms through which companies can gain from being located in clusters, focussing thereby in particular on possible knowledge spillovers. Therefore, based on an integration of the theoretical perspectives from the strategic management (e.g. resource-based view) and the economic geography literature (e.g. cluster approach), variables from three different levels of analysis (micro-level, meso-level and macro-level) are considered separately as well as interactively. By analysing a unique multilevel dataset of 11,889 companies in Germany, including 1,391 firms that are located within a cluster, evidence is found that being located in a cluster has indeed a positive impact on firm innovative performance. However, the results also indicate that firms benefit unequally within the cluster environment, depending on the specific firm, cluster and market/industry conditions.

Keywords: knowledge spillovers; cluster effect; firm performance; multilevelanalysis; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 L10 L22 O30 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03, Revised 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-geo, nep-sbm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2013.pdf Version March 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:egu:wpaper:2013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).