Is innovation (increasingly) concentrated in large cities? An international comparison

Michael Fritsch () and Michael Wyrwich

No 2020-003, Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Abstract: We investigate the geographic concentration of patenting in large cities using a sample of 14 developed countries. There is wide dispersion of the share of patented inventions in large metropolitan areas. South Korea and the US are two extreme outliers where patenting is highly concentrated in large cities. We do not find any general trend that there is a geographic concentration of patents for the period 2000-2014. There is also no general trend that inventors in large cities have more patents than in rural areas (scaling). Hence, while agglomeration economies of large cities may offer advantages for innovation activities, the extent of these advantages is not very large. We conclude that popular theories over-emphasize the importance of large cities for innovation activities.

Keywords: Innovation; patents; cities; urban scaling; creativity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O31 O57 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-02-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ipr, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2020/wp_2020_003.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is innovation (increasingly) concentrated in large cities? An international comparison (2021)
Working Paper: Is innovation (increasingly) concentrated in large cities? An international comparison (2020)
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:jrp:jrpwrp:2020-003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Markus Pasche ().