Access to Workers or Employers? An Intra-Urban Analysis of Plant Location Decisions

Mark Kutzbach

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: This analysis attributes economies of agglomeration to either labor market pooling or employer-based productivity spillovers by distinguishing the effect of access to workers, measured by place-of-residence, from the effect of access to employers. New establishment location choices serve as a measure of productivity advantages, while census tract level data on access to same-industry employment, other-industry employment, and specialized workers, as well as metropolitan area fixed effects, measure sources of agglomeration and other locational characteristics. The four industries included are selected so that each relies on a workforce with a specialized occupation that is identifiable by place-of-residence, and that productivity and cost advantages are the primary drivers of location choice. The results show that both access to specialized workers and access to same-industry employers contribute to economies of agglomeration at an intra-urban spatial scale, and that the magnitude of the worker effect is large relative to employer-based productivity spillovers.

Keywords: Economies of Agglomeration; Labor Market Pooling; Commuting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2010-09, Revised 2012-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2010/CES-WP-10-21R.pdf Revised version, 2012 (application/pdf)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2010/CES-WP-10-21.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

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:cen:wpaper:10-21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().