Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration

Marcus Berliant, Robert Reed () and Ping Wang

No 33, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics

Abstract: Despite wide recognition of their significant role in explaining sustained growth and economic development, uncompensated knowledge spillovers have not yet been fully modeled with a microeconomic foundation. The main purpose of this paper is to illustrate the exchange of knowledge as well as its consequences on agglomerative activity in a general-equilibrium search-theoretic framework. Agents, possessing differentiated types of knowledge, search for partners to exchange ideas and create new knowledge in order to improve production efficacy. When individuals' types of knowledge are too diverse, a match is less likely to generate significant innovations. We demonstrate that the extent of agglomeration has significant implications for the patterns of information flows in economies. Further, by simultaneously determining the patterns of knowledge exchange and the spatial agglomeration of an economy we identify additional channels for interaction between agglomerative activity and knowledge exchange. Finally, contrary to previous work in spatial agglomeration, our model suggests that agglomerative environments may be either under-specialized and under-populated, or over-specialized and over-populated relative to the social optimum.

JEL-codes: C78 D51 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/VUECON/vu00-w33.pdf First version, 2000 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Knowledge exchange, matching, and agglomeration (2006)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2006)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2004)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2003)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2003)
Working Paper: Knowledge exchange, matching, and agglomeration (2001)
Working Paper: Knowledge Exchange, Matching, and Agglomeration (2000)
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:van:wpaper:0033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().