Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

This study models relationships between United States higher education activities and regional economic performance, 2001 – 2011. Advances include incorporating all degree-granting institutions; estimating spatial spillovers; and comparing multiple economic outcomes, including production and entrepreneurship. Higher education impacts vary by outcome measure but are less influential than in previous studies. Spillovers are substantial up to 60 miles (97 km), reflecting considerable influence across space. More advanced degrees, science and engineering education, and population educational attainment are positively associated with entrepreneurial activity. These findings encourage the traditional university missions of research and teaching, and general policies promoting entrepreneurship, to support economic …

This paper examines the relationships between several aspects of regional industrial structure and employment change in the United States manufacturing sector and 19 subsectors from 1987 to 1997. Economic diversity, industrial specialization, and competitive structure are considered together in a non-causal regression framework in order to assess their relative associations with economic performance. The innovative features of the research are considering together multiple distinct facets of industrial structure at the regional scale, emphasizing the less commonly studied characteristic of industrial competitive structure, and exploiting confidential microdata to construct and evaluate detailed metrics across broad geographic and industrial ranges. The findings …

The spatial extent of localized agglomeration economies constitutes one of the central current questions in regional science. It is crucial for understanding firm location decisions and for assessing the influence of proximity in shaping spatial patterns of economic activity, yet clear-cut answers are difficult to come by. Theoretical work often fails to define or specify the spatial dimension of agglomeration phenomena. Existing empirical evidence is far from consistent. Most sources of data on economic performance do not supply micro-level information containing usable geographic locations. This paper provides evidence of the distances across which distinct sources of agglomeration economies generate benefits …

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 …