Agglomeration externalities: Marshall versus Jacobs

Gerben Panne ()

Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2004, vol. 14, issue 5, 593-604

Abstract: The literature remains inconclusive as to whether Marshallian specialization or Jacobian diversification externalities favor regional innovativeness. The specialization thesis asserts that regions with production structures specialized towards a particular industry tend to be more innovative in that particular industry, as it allows for knowledge to spill over between similar firms. The diversification thesis argues that knowledge spills over between different industries, causing diversified production structures to be more innovative. A closely related debate evolves around local competitiveness hypotheses. Using an original database of innovation counts, both these issues are addressed for the Dutch context. The results show that the Marshallian specialization thesis holds, though more pronounced for R&D intensive and small firms. Fierce local competition within an industry negatively affects innovativeness in that particular industry. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2004

Keywords: Innovation; Agglomeration externalities; Knowledge spillovers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (108)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00191-004-0232-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:joevec:v:14:y:2004:i:5:p:593-604

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/191/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-004-0232-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Evolutionary Economics is currently edited by Uwe Cantner, Elias Dinopoulos, Horst Hanusch and Luigi Orsenigo

More articles in Journal of Evolutionary Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().