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Working Paper
Localized Knowledge Spillovers: Evidence from the Spatial Clustering of R&D Labs and Patent Citations
SUPERCEDES EORKING PAPER 17-32 Buzard et al. (2017) show that American R&D labs are highly spatially concentrated even within a given metropolitan area. We argue that the geography of their clusters is better suited for studying knowledge spillovers than are states, metropolitan areas, or other political or administrative boundaries that have predominantly been used in previous studies. In this paper, we assign patents and citations to these newly defined clusters of R&D labs. Our tests show that the localization of knowledge spillovers, as measured via patent citations, is strongest at small ...
Working Paper
DO NON-COMPETE COVENANTS INFLUENCE STATE STARTUP ACTIVITY? EVIDENCE FROM THE MICHIGAN EXPERIMENT
This paper examines how the enforceability of employee non compete agreements affects the entry of new establishments and jobs created by these new firms. We use a panel of startup activity for the U.S. states for the period 1977 to 2013. We exploit Michigan’s inadvertent policy reversal in 1985 that transformed the state from a non enforcing to an enforcing state as a quasinatural experiment to estimate the causal effect of enforcement on startup activity. In a difference-in-difference framework, we find little support for the widely held view that enforcement of non-compete agreements ...
Working Paper
Beautiful City: Leisure Amenities and Urban Growth
Modern urban economic theory and policymakers are coming to see the provision of consumer-leisure amenities as a way to attract population, especially the highly skilled and their employers. However, past studies have arguably only provided indirect evidence of the importance of leisure amenities for urban development. In this paper, we propose and validate the number of tourist trips and the number of crowdsourced picturesque locations as measures of consumer revealed preferences for local lifestyle amenities. Urban population growth in the 1990-2010 period was about 10 percentage points ...
Working Paper
The agglomeration of R&D labs
This paper has been superseded by WP 15-03. The authors study the location and productivity of more than 1,000 research and development (R&D) labs located in the Northeast corridor of the U.S. Using a variety of spatial econometric techniques, they find that these labs are substantially more concentrated in space than the underlying distribution of manufacturing activity. Ripley's K-function tests over a variety of spatial scales reveal that the strongest evidence of concentration occurs at two discrete distances: one at about one-quarter of a mile and another at about 40 miles. These ...
Working Paper
Regional income dynamics
Working Paper
Matching and learning in cities: urban density and the rate of invention
This paper examines the role local labor markets play in the production of innovations. The authors appeal to a labor market matching model ( la Berliant, Reed, and Wang 2004) to argue that in dense urban areas, workers are more selective in their matches and are therefore more productive. They find that, all else equal, patent intensity (patents per capita) is 20 percent higher in a metropolitan area with an employment density (jobs per square mile) twice that of another metropolitan area. Since local employment density doubles nearly four times across their sample, the implied gains in ...
Journal Article
Clusters of knowledge: R&D proximity and the spillover effect
> T he United States is home to some of the most innovative companies in the world, such as Apple, Facebook, and Google, to name a few. Inventive activity depends on research and development, and R&D depends on, among other things, the exchange of ideas among individuals. People?s physical proximity is a key ingredient in the innovation process. Steve Jobs understood this when he helped to design the layout of Pixar Animation Studios. The original plan called for three buildings, with separate offices for animators, scientists, and executives. Jobs instead opted for a single building with a ...
Working Paper
Urban density and the rate of invention
Economists, beginning with Alfred Marshall, have studied the significance of cities in the production and exploitation of information externalities that, today, we call knowledge spillovers. This paper presents robust evidence of those effects. We show that patent intensity?the per capita invention rate?is positively related to the density of employment in the highly urbanized portion of MAs. All else equal, a city with twice the employment density (jobs per square mile) of another city will exhibit a patent intensity (patents per capita) that is 20 percent higher. Patent intensity is ...
Journal Article
Do education and training lead to faster growth in cities?
Journal Article
Should states fear the effects of a changing dollar?