What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns

Glenn Ellison (), Edward Ludwig Glaeser () and William Kerr ()

No 13068, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many industries are geographically concentrated. Many mechanisms that could account for such agglomeration have been proposed. We note that these theories make different predictions about which pairs of industries should be coagglomerated. We discuss the measurement of coagglomeration and use data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database from 1972 to 1997 to compute pairwise coagglomeration measurements for U.S. manufacturing industries. Industry attributes are used to construct measures of the relevance of each of Marshall's three theories of industry agglomeration to each industry pair: (1) agglomeration saves transport costs by proximity to input suppliers or final consumers, (2) agglomeration allows for labor market pooling, and (3) agglomeration facilitates intellectual spillovers. We assess the importance of the theories via regressions of coagglomeration indices on these measures. Data on characteristics of corresponding industries in the United Kingdom are used as instruments. We find evidence to support each mechanism. Our results suggest that input-output dependencies are the most important factor, followed by labor pooling.

JEL-codes: A1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Date: 2007-04
Note: PE
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13068.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns (2007)
Working Paper: What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns (2007)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13068

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13068
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().