Productivity Spillovers among Knowledge Workers in Agglomerations: Evidence from GitHub

Lena Abou El-Komboz and Thomas Fackler
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Lena Abou El-Komboz: ifo Institute, LMU Munich
Thomas Fackler: ifo Institute, LMU Munich, CESifo, Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard

No 399, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Software engineering is a field with strong geographic concentration, with Silicon Valley as the epitome of a tech cluster. Yet, most studies on the productivity effects of agglomerations measure innovation with patent data, thus capturing only a fraction of the industry's activity. With data from the open source platform GitHub, our study contributes an alternative proxy for productivity, complementing the literature by covering a broad range of software engineering. With user activity data covering the years 2015 to 2021, we relate cluster size to an individual's productivity. Our findings suggest that physical proximity to a large number of other knowledge workers in the same field leads to spillovers, increasing productivity considerably. In further analyses, we confirm the causal relationship with an IV approach and study heterogeneities by cluster size, initial productivity and project characteristics.

Keywords: agglomeration effects; knowledge spillovers; open source; online collaboration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 J24 O33 O36 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-05-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-eff, nep-geo, nep-ino, nep-lma, nep-sbm, nep-tid and nep-ure
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