Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration

Marcus Berliant (), Robert R. Reed () and Ping Wang ()

No 33, Working Papers from Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University

Abstract: Despite wide recognition of their significant role in explaining sustained growth and economic development, uncompensated knowledge spillovers have not yet been fully modeled with a microeconomic foundation. The main purpose of this paper is to illustrate the exchange of knowledge as well as its consequences on agglomerative activity in a general-equilibrium search-theoretic framework. Agents, possessing differentiated types of knowledge, search for partners to exchange ideas and create new knowledge in order to improve production efficacy. When individuals' types of knowledge are too diverse, a match is less likely to generate significant innovations. We demonstrate that the extent of agglomeration has significant implications for the patterns of information flows in economies. Further, by simultaneously determining the patterns of knowledge exchange and the spatial agglomeration of an economy we identify additional channels for interaction between agglomerative activity and knowledge exchange. Finally, contrary to previous work in spatial agglomeration, our model suggests that agglomerative environments may be either under-specialized and under-populated, or over-specialized and over-populated relative to the social optimum.

JEL-codes: C78 D51 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-08
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/wparchive/workpaper/vu00-w33.pdf First version, 2000 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Knowledge exchange, matching, and agglomeration (2000)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2000)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2003)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2004)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2006)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2003)
Journal Article: Knowledge exchange, matching, and agglomeration (2006)
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:van:wpaper:0033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diana Weymark ().