A meta-analysis of estimates of urban agglomeration economies

Patricia Melo, Daniel Graham () and Robert Noland

Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2009, vol. 39, issue 3, 332-342

Abstract: Although the productivity gains of urban agglomeration economies are generally found to be positive, there is a great deal of variability in the magnitude of reported estimates. This paper undertakes a quantitative review of the empirical literature on agglomeration through a meta-analysis of 729 elasticities taken from 34 different studies. The objective is to make sense of the range of values for agglomeration economies found in the literature by identifying some key characteristics that affect the magnitude of the results obtained. Our analysis confirms that study characteristics do matter. In particular, we find that country specific effects, the industrial coverage, the specification of agglomeration economies, and the presence of controls for both unobserved cross-sectional heterogeneity and differences in time-variant labor quality can give rise to large differences in the results reported in the literature. In contrast, correcting for reverse causality of agglomeration does not seem to produce noticeable changes in the size of urban agglomeration estimates. We also test for publication bias and find some evidence supporting the presence of positive reporting bias. The findings support the intuition that agglomeration estimates for any particular empirical context may have little relevance elsewhere.

Keywords: Meta-analysis; Agglomeration; Productivity; Elasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (406)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166-0462(08)00126-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:regeco:v:39:y:2009:i:3:p:332-342

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Science and Urban Economics is currently edited by D.P McMillen and Y. Zenou

More articles in Regional Science and Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().