Agglomeration Externalities and the Dynamics of Firm Location Choices

Holger Sieg, Daniele Coen-Pirani and Jeff Brinkman
Additional contact information
Holger Sieg: University of Pennsylvania
Jeff Brinkman: Carnegie Mellon

No 966, 2011 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We develop a new dynamic general equilibrium model of firm location choice that can explain the observed sorting of firms by productivity and is consistent with the observed entry, exit, and relocation decisions of firms within an urban economy. We discuss existence of equilibrium of and characterize the stationary distribution of firms in each location. The parameters of the model can be estimated using a nested fixed point algorithm. We implement the estimator using data collect by Dunn and Bradstreet for the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The data suggest that firms located in the city are older and larger than firms located outside the urban core. As a consequence they use more land and labor in the production process. However, they face higher rental rates for land and office space which implies that they operate with a higher employee per land ratio. We find that our model explains these observed features of the data well. Finally, we consider the impact of different relocation policies that provide targeted subsidies to new start-ups and superstar firms.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2011/paper_966.pdf (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:red:sed011:966

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2011 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann (chuichuiche@gmail.com).