Agglomeration, accessibility and productivity: Evidence for large metropolitan areas in the US

Patricia Melo, Daniel J Graham, David Levinson and Sarah Aarabi
Additional contact information
Daniel J Graham: Imperial College London, UK
Sarah Aarabi: MBA Candidate at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA

Urban Studies, 2017, vol. 54, issue 1, 179-195

Abstract: This paper estimates the productivity gains from agglomeration economies for a sample of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States using measures of urban agglomeration based on employment density and employment accessibility. The latter is a more accurate measure of economic proximity and allows testing for the spatial decay of agglomeration effects with increasing travel time. We find that the productivity gains from urban agglomeration are consistent between measures, with elasticity values between 0.07 and 0.10. The large majority of the productivity gains occur within the first 20 minutes, and do not appear to exhibit significant nonlinearities.

Keywords: metropolitan areas; productivity; spatial decay; transport accessibility; urban agglomeration economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098015624850 (text/html)

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:sae:urbstu:v:54:y:2017:i:1:p:179-195

DOI: 10.1177/0042098015624850

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().