Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Industrial concentration and market power have been studied extensively at the national scale, in fields ranging from economics and industrial organization to regional science and economic development. At the regional scale, however, industrial structure and firm size relationships have received little attention outside of non-generalizable case studies, primarily because accurate measurements require difficult-to-obtain plant- or firm-level information. Readily available secondary data sources on establishment size distributions (such as County Business Patterns or the Census of Manufactures) cannot be linked to performance information for particular establishments or firms. Yet region-specific industrial structure may be a crucial determinant of firm performance and …