Employers’ Agglomeration and Innovation in a Small Business Economy: The Italian Case

Giuseppe Croce (), Edoardo Porto, Emanuela Ghignoni and Andrea Ricci
Additional contact information
Edoardo Porto: DISES University of Federico II
Andrea Ricci: Statistical Office – ISFOL

Chapter Chapter 8 in Geographical Labor Market Imbalances, 2015, pp 167-192 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter analyzes the impact of agglomeration on product and process innovation in Italy. Our main goal is to gain a better understanding of the spatial dimension of innovative activities. Based on a unique firm-level source of data provided by ISFOL containing information on employers’ personal profiles, we attempt to shed more light into the black box of the local knowledge spillovers. To this end, besides standard density measures, we define and employ an original density indicator and perform a series of IV regressions. Different from the main strands of the literature on this topic, which envisages positive knowledge spillover effects stemming from agglomeration, we do not find significant evidence that agglomeration fosters innovation. In particular, when small businesses are considered, a negative and significant effect arises. Such evidence suggests that in denser areas detrimental congestion effects tend to prevail and discourage innovation. Moreover, for this subsample of firms, the employers’ personal profile prove to be a relevant boost for innovation.

Keywords: Product and process innovation; Agglomeration; Knowledge spillovers; Poaching; Employer’s education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Chapter: Employers’ Agglomeration and Innovation in a Small Business Economy: The Italian Case (2015)
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:aiechp:978-3-642-55203-8_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783642552038

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-55203-8_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in AIEL Series in Labour Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().