The Technological Resilience of U.S. Cities

Pierre-Alexandre Balland, David Rigby () and Ron Boschma ()
Additional contact information
David Rigby: Departments of Geography and Statistics, University of California Los Angeles

No 2014/32, Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research

Abstract: We study the resilience of cities by analyzing their capacity to sustain the production of technology when facing adverse events. Patent applications for 366 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas, spanning the period 1975 to 2002, are used to analyze the vulnerability and response of cities to technological crises. Crises are defined as periods of sustained negative growth in patenting activity. We find that the frequency, intensity and duration of technological crises vary considerably across American cities. We examine how the technological knowledge bases of cities, their network openness and institutional environment condition resilience. Econometric analysis suggests that cities with knowledge bases that are diverse, flexible and proximate to technologies in which they do not currently possess comparative advantage tend to avoid technological crises, have limited downturns in patent production and recover faster from crisis events.

Keywords: Urban resilience; technological crisis; related knowledge structure; institutions; inter-city networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 L65 O33 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2014-12-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his, nep-ino and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.circle.lu.se/upload/CIRCLE/workingpapers/201432_Balland_et_all.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The technological resilience of US cities (2015)
Working Paper: The Technological Resilience of U.S. Cities (2014)
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:hhs:lucirc:2014_032

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Innovation Studies from Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research, Lund University, PO Box 117, SE-22100 Lund, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Torben Schubert ().