skill diversity of cities and entrepreneurship this paper analyses the effect of city skill diversity on local entrepreneurship it proposes a mechanism based framework to study the precise channels through which skill diversity contributes to

multiattribute preference analysis with performance targets this paper develops an approach based on performance targets to assess a preference function for a multiobjective decision under uncertainty this approach yields preference functions that are strategically equivalent to conventional multiattribute utility functions but the target oriented approach is more natural for some classes of decisions in some situations the target oriented preference conditions are analogous to reliability theory conditions for series or parallel failure modes in a system in such cases reinterpreting the conditions using reliability concepts can be useful in assessing the preference function the target oriented approach is also a generalization of common forms of goal programming the approach has particular applicability for resource allocation decisions where the outcome of the decision is significantly determined by the actions of other stakeholders to the decision such as new product development or decision making in a controversial regulated environment

compact cities and economic productivity in mexico this paper examines the contingent nature of agglomeration economies existing empirical evidence that compact cities are more productive is mostly from countries and regions with highly productive

geography industrial organization and agglomeration this paper makes two contributions to the empirical literature on agglomeration economies first the paper uses a unique and rich database in conjunction with mapping software to measure the geographic extent of agglomerative externalities previous papers have been forced to assume that agglomeration economies are club goods that operate at a metropolitan scale second the paper tests for the existence of organizational agglomeration economies of the kind studied qualitatively by saxenian 1994 this is a potentially important source of increasing returns that previous empirical work has not considered results indicate that localization economies attenuate rapidly and that industrial organization affects the benefits of agglomeration

urban development in the united states 1690 1990 the united states transformed itself from a rural to an urban society over the last three cen turies after a century of unremarkable growth the pace of urbanization was historically un precedented between the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the twentieth century the urban population continued to increase but in a much more dispersed manner as the sub urban population increased throughout these developments cities also exhibited considerable variation in their population sizes this paper finds that the pace and pattern of u s urban development are explained by changes in regional comparative advantage and in economies in transportation and local public goods which in turn were determined by the changes in the economic structures of cities this paper also finds that cities varied considerably in size because the larger cities reduced market transaction costs associated with coordinating greater geograph ic division of labor

economic growth in a cross section of cities abstract we examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth between 1960 and 1990 income and population growth move together and both types of growth are 1 positively related to initial schooling 2 negatively related to initial unemployment and 3 negatively related to the initial share of employment in manufacturing racial composition and segregation are uncorrelated with urban growth across all cities but in cities with large nonwhite communities segregation is positively correlated with population growth government expenditures except for sanitation are uncorrelated with growth government debt is positively correlated with later growth

search sorting and urban agglomeration studies have suggested that urban agglomeration enhances productivity by facilitating the firm worker matching process this article develops a model that formalizes this notion and demonstrates that when firm capital and worker skill are complementary in production urban agglomeration will tend to generate more efficient yet segregated matches as a result not only will local market size be positively associated with average productivity it will also generate greater between skill group wage inequality and a higher expected return to skill acquisition recent data from the counties and metropolitan areas of the united states is consistent with each of these implications

fdi and industrial restructuring in post wto greater prd implications on regional growth in china this paper aims at studying the investment flows in the greater pearl river delta region hong kong prd in china and its impacts on industrial restructuring at the firm level using a business survey with the hong kong prd entity acted as a core periphery economy the critical effects of gravity distance on transaction costs in the determination of investment flows are examined statistically by a gravity model by incorporating a hypothetical infrastructural construction project survey findings show that the evolution of the cross border operations at the main core has directed the outward fdi flows and the subsequent industrial structural adjustments of the core periphery economy this paper has presented a typical illustrative case for further studies of investment flows and its impacts upon industrial adjustments and performance in other regions in china especially after the wto accession its implication on regional economic growth is also discussed

productivity gains from geographic concentration of human capital evidence from the cities abstract based on recent theoretical developments the argument is made that the average level of human capital is a local public good cities with higher average levels of human capital should therefore have higher wages and higher land rents after conditioning on the characteristics of individual workers and dwellings this prediction is supported by data for standard metropolitan statistical areas smsas in the united states where the smsa average levels of formal education and work experience are used as proxies for the average level of human capital the alternative explanations of omitted smsa variables and self selection are evaluated an estimate of the effect of an additional year of average education on total factor productivity is computed

nonstationarities in stock returns the paper outlines a methodology for analyzing daily stock returns that relinquishes the assumption of global stationarity giving up this common working hypothesis reflects our belief that fundamental features of the financial markets are continuously and significantly changing our approach approximates the nonstationary data locally by stationary models the methodology is applied to the s p 500 series of returns covering a period of over seventy years of market activity we find most of the dynamics of this time series to be concentrated in shifts of the unconditional variance the forecasts based on our nonstationary unconditional modeling were found to be superior to those obtained in a stationary long memory framework and to those based on a stationary garch 1 1 data generating process

retail agglomeration and competition externalities evidence from openings and closings of multiline department stores in the u s from the perspective of an existing retailer the optimal size of a cluster of retail activity represents a trade off between the marginal increases in consumer attraction from another store agains

estimating dynamic localization economies the inadvertent success of the specialization index and the location quotient estimating dynamic localization economies the inadvertent success of the specialization index and the location quotient regional studies after addressing definitional issues on the concepts of c

the dynamics of agglomeration externalities along the life cycle of industries neffke f henning m boschma r lundquist k j and olander l o the dynamics of agglomeration externalities along the life cycle of industries regional studies this paper investigates the changing roles of agglomeration externalities along the industry life cycle it is argued that industries have different agglomeration needs in different stages of their life cycles because their mode of competition innovation intensity and learning opportunities change over time for twelve swedish manufacturing industries it is determined for each year between 1974 and 2004 whether the industry is in a young intermediate or mature stage whereas marshall arrow romer mar externalities steadily increase with the maturity of industries the effects of local diversity jacobs externalities are positive for young industries but decline and even become negative for more mature industries neffke f henning m boschma r lundquist k j et olander l o la dynamique des effets externes d agglomeration tout

commodity variety and seaport performance ducruet c koster h r a and van der beek d j commodity variety and seaport performance regional studies seaports are key locations within value chains and production networks port policies of national and local governments seek higher rents through strategies of specialization or diversification elaborating on longstanding research about urban and regional development this paper proposes an empirical investigation of the interplay between traffic variety and port performance the analysis of traffic data per commodity for 330 european ports highlights the influence of multiple factors such as location function and local context together with the specificity of some commodities regarding port evolution the demonstrated importance of territorial factors provides a good complement to the existing literature mostly focused on global networks and economic players ducruet c koster h r a et van der beek d j l eventail des produits et la performance des ports maritimes regional studies le

measuring and explaining the impact of productive efficiency on economic development a limitation of most empirical cross country studies that focus on determinants of gross domestic product gdp is that they fail to distinguish explicitly between inputs used in production and conditions that facilitate production for example physical capital human capital and labor are production inputs whereas the quality of institutions macroeconomic stability and market quality are conditions that facilitate production this article takes this distinction seriously and uses a stochastic frontier approach to study factors affecting economic performance a panel data set of 71 countries for the 1980 98 periods is used to estimate a production frontier with physical capital human capital and labor as inputs the article also analyzes what drives productive efficiency using the institutional framework macroeconomic stability market quality and urbanization as possible explanatory factors urbanization turns out to be an important determinant with the rule of law inflation rate and market quality also affecting productive efficiency

cities and cultures we investigate whether cultural diversity across us cities measured as the variety of native languages spoken by city residents is associated with any effect on their productivity diversity of cultures may imply diversity of production skills of abilities and of occupations that enhances the productive performance of a city on the other hand transaction costs and frictions across groups may hurt productivity similarly diversity in available goods and services can increase utility but distaste for or hostility to different cultural groups may decrease it using census data from 1970 to 1990 we find that wages and employment density of us born workers were systematically higher ceteris paribus in cities with richer linguistic diversity these positive correlations reveal a net positive effect of diversity on productivity that survives robustness checks and instrumental variable estimation this effect is found to be stronger for highly educated workers and for white workers we also show that better assimilated non native speakers i e those who speak english well and have been in the us for more than five years are most beneficial to the productivity of us born workers

the missing piece in policy analysis social security reform this lecture discusses the economic losses that result from an unfunded social security retirement system and the potential gain from shifting to a funded system the social security payroll tax distorts labor supply and the form in which compensation is paid although each individual s benefits are linked to that individual s previous payroll tax payments the low equilibrium rate of return inherent in an unfunded system implies a net payroll tax that causes distortions the resulting deadweight loss is 1 of each year s gdp in perpetuity an amount equal to 20 of payroll tax revenue and a 50 increase in deadweight loss of the personal income tax also there is the loss of investment income resulting from forcing employees to accept the low implicit return of an unfunded program rather than the much higher return paid on private saving or in a funded social security program the present value of the annual losses from using an unfunded system exceeds the benefit to those who received windfall transfers when the program began and when it expanded shifting to a funded program cannot reverse the crowding out of capital that has already occurred recognizing the existing unfunded obligation only makes that piece of the national debt explicit but shifting to a funded program limits crowding out of capital formation to the amount that already occurred future increases in annual saving that result from economic growth are able to earn the higher rate of return on real capital the present value of these gains is equivalent to a perpetuity of more than 2 of gdp a year the combi nation of improved labor market incentives and higher real return on saving has a net present value gain of more than 15 trillion an amount equivalent to three percent of each future year s gdp forever this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

regional productivity variation and the impact of public capital stock an analysis with spatial interaction with reference to spain in this article we examine whether variations in the level of public capital across spain s provinces affected productivity levels over the period 1996 to 2005 the analysis is motivated by contemporary urban economics theory involving a production function for the competitive sector of the economy industry which includes the level of composite services derived from service firms under monopolistic competition the outcome is potentially increasing returns to scale resulting from pecuniary externalities deriving from internal increasing returns in the monopolistic competition sector we extend the production function by also making log labour efficiency a function of log total public capital stock and log human capital stock leading to a simple and empirically tractable reduced form linking productivity level to density of employment human capital and public capital stock the model is further extended to include technological externalities or spillovers across provinces using panel data

agglomeration and trade some additional perspectives the form of agglomeration economies those internal to the firm as well as those external to it is reviewed consideration is next given to recent changes in the regional state economies of the us midwest as part of an effort to explore the evolving nature of agglomeration economies particular attention is paid to the changing relationship between the establishment and the firm and to radical developments that have affected the transportation sector the impact of these changes on the nature of interstate trade and on the structure of the metropolitan economy are then examined there follows a discussion of how agglomeration economies are being supplemented and perhaps replaced by less spatially constrained advantages finally certain of the more important implications of these various trends are discussed

did regional economic diversity influence the effects of the great recession using data for u s counties from 2005 to 2012 we test whether higher levels of economic diversity mediated the effects of the great recession via four measures of stability spatial spillover effects are modeled by the use of the spatial durbin estimator with heteroscedastic errors the data generally support the central hypothesis that higher levels of diversity within a county are associated with enhanced employment stability across all counties as well as subsets of metro and nonmetro counties results for wage stability however appear to contradict our other findings we suggest that underlying labor elasticities can bridge these apparent contradictory results jel r11 r12 o47

optimum product variety in urban areas abstract a monopolistically competitive industry in which firms produce differentiated products subject to increasing returns to scale technology is superimposed on a monocentric residential land use model the main result is the demonstration that given an isoelastic demand structure the market equilibrium will correspond to a first best optimum if firms own shares in land rents and population is set optimally this result contrasts with existing literature on monopolistic competition and product diversity in which it is contended that the market equilibrium is a second best optimum if firms do not own shares in land rents a corrective subsidy paid to firms and financed out of a tax on differential land rents will result in replication of the planning solution

agglomeration opportunism and the organization of production abstract recent economic analysis of outsourcing has emphasized its international dimension in contrast this paper focuses on local outsourcing the paper specifies and solves a model where the organization of production vertically integrated or not and the location of production agglomerated or not are jointly determined the paper shows that agglomeration reduces opportunism a thick market effect and so serves as a substitute for integration this force will lead firms to agglomerate the paper also shows that the normative properties of equilibrium with local outsourcing are not as clear cut as for international outsourcing since local agglomeration is achieved at the cost of congestion local markets may be too thick which would not be the case for an increase in the thickness of a world market finally the many changes in economic and social circumstance that have been labeled globalization do not impact only vertically integrated firms they also impact cities and industry clusters to the extent that agglomeration is a substitute for vertical integration

technological specialization and variety in urban invention o huallachain b and lee d s technological specialization and variety in urban invention regional studies urban economic theory distinguishes between knowledge spillovers that occur within specializations and those that cross technologies empirical analysis has sought to gauge their relative strength but the results are inconclusive metropolitan specialization and variety at different aggregation levels of a us patent classification system are assessed using theil s relative entropy index the results show that specialization and variety are not competing features of urban technological structure cities can have both the invention rate positively associates with specialization in diverse technologies the cross fertilization of ideas among skilled professionals with different expertise and the interaction between specialists of narrow fields of knowledge are both important in technological advance the most inventive cities have deep specializations in different technologies the results also sho

economic growth size of the agricultural sector and urbanization in africa this paper uses variations in international commodity prices and rainfall to construct instrumental variables estimates of the within country effect that changes in the size of the agricultural sector and gdp per capita growth have on the urbanization rate for a panel of 41 african countries during the period 1960 2007 the paper s three main findings are that i decreases in the share of agricultural value added lead to a significant increase in the urbanization rate ii conditional on changes in the share of agricultural value added gdp per capita growth does not significantly affect the urbanization rate iii increases in the urbanization rate had a significant negative average effect on gdp per capita growth

estimation of garch process in the presence of structural change abstract this paper blends the switching regression model of goldfeld and quandt 1973 with the garch model of bollerslev 1987 in order to estimate and test for the significance of garch parameters in the presence of structural breaks the garch parameter values the switch date at which one regime supersedes another and the gradualness of each regime switch are all determined endogenously

the distinctive city divergent patterns in growth hierarchy and specialisation with accelerated world market integration cities compete with each other cities as sites of production and consumption targeting firms and households as semi autonomous location decision makers distinction may be sought in productive structure consumption and identity in this paper contradictory trends towards homogenisation and distinctiveness are theorised studying the occupational structure of 50 large us metropolitan areas it is found that distinctiveness has been increasing in economic base occupations though some heavily blue collar cities edge is eroding employment in consumption activities has been growing faster than in the economic base and cities are becoming more alike in consumption structure it is concluded that the search for niches in exporting sectors and related occupational mix is key to urban resurgence

taxes and agglomeration economies how are they related to nonprofit firm location author affiliation teresa d harrison department of economics drexel university 3141 chestnut street philadelphia pa 19104 usa tharrison drexel edu1 introductionnonprofits are an ever increasing component of the u s economy from 1997 2001 employment growth in the nonprofit sector averaged 2 5 outpacing both the business 1 8 and the government sectors 1 6 moore 2004 much of this growth stems from new nonprofits yet few studies have investigated possible determinants of nonprofit entry and location decisions most of these studies focus on demand side factors wolch and geiger 1983 downes and greenstein 1996 bielefeld murdoch and waddell 1997 for example downes and greenstein 1996 focus on demographic and religious characteristics of the surrounding community and its relation to private school location in this paper i use firm level data and focus on potentially important supply side variables tax rates and agglomeration economies most nonprofits are exempt from corporate sales and property taxes hansmann 1987 and gulley and santerre 1993 find evidence that higher corporate property and sales taxes are positively related to nonprofit market share however market share measures obfuscate the dynamics of the industry in terms of entry and exit rates if market share for nonprofits increases in response to higher tax rates this could be because new nonprofits are entering or because for profits are leaving the industry identifying these two cases is impossible with market share data using nonprofit tax return data i examine the relation between these tax exemptions and state county location decisions of new nonprofits to my knowledge this is the first paper to study these interactions at the individual firm level nonprofits also receive tax favored status due to the individual tax deduction on charitable contributions gentry and penrod 1998 employees of and donors to the nonprofits will be affected by the individual tax rates this in turn alters the costs to the nonprofit of location in a high or low tax area unlike previous studies i therefore investigate the relation between individual marginal tax rates and nonprofit location another potential supply side determinant of firm location decisions is the existing firm concentration in the area the potential economies of scale generated by proximity to other firms have been extensively examined in for profit industries 1 previous studies have generally found a positive relation between agglomeration and location carlton 1983 bartik 1985 woodward 1992 gius and frese 2002 rosenthal and strange 2003 to my knowledge bielefeld et al 2004 is the only study that examines nonprofit agglomeration finding evidence of agglomeration in dallas texas this warrants additional examination because nonprofit output is generally service driven and less mobile thus agglomeration implies greater direct competition making market saturation a larger issue in the nonprofit market using a nationwide dataset i examine how location and existing firm concentration are related and explore the potential presence of market saturation i also investigate possible differences between inter and intra industry agglomeration my results provide new insight into nonprofit firm behavior in most cases higher tax rates are associated with new firm location but the results for corporate and property taxes vary across the sample years i find that individual tax rates are an important consideration for nonprofits and are positively correlated to location my analysis also contributes to the literature by examining how the sensitivity to tax rates varies according to the sources of revenues for the institution firms that depend highly on individual donations are more likely to locate in high individual tax states while nonprofits with large mission related revenues are more sensitive to the property tax rate

classic or new monopsony searching for evidence in nursing labor markets the market for registered nurses rns is often offered as an example of classic monopsony while a new monopsony literature emphasizes that firm labor supply is upward sloping independent of market structure using data from multiple sources we explore the relationship between nursing wages in hospitals and measures of classic and new monopsony wage level analysis fails to provide support for classic monopsony the relative wages of rns in 240 u s labor markets being largely uncorrelated with hospital system concentration longitudinal analysis shows nursing wages declining with increases in hospital concentration we interpret these results as providing support for classic monopsony effects in the short run but question whether wage effects are sustained in the long run no relationship is found between nursing wages and a new monopsony measure of mobility but support for new monopsony is found for women elsewhere in the labor market rns display greater interemployer mobility than do women or men in general two conclusions follow first upward sloping labor supply need not imply monopsonistic outcomes second absent more compelling evidence nursing should not be held up as a prototypical example of monopsony classic or new

economic transition dynamic externalities and city industry growth in china using data on two digit manufacturing industries for prefecture level cities during the period of 2000 05 this study found a significant non linear relationship between dynamic externalities and city industry growth industrial specialisation and local competition may help city industry growth but may harm growth when they exceed a certain level diversity helps industry growth but only when it reaches a certain level liberalised globalised and locally protected industries are more likely to benefit from dynamic externalities industries located in cities with greater authorities are also found to grow faster the empirical findings indicate that economic transition has created conditions to allow a larger role of dynamic externalities in stimulating city industry growth

clustering of economic activities in polycentric urban regions the case of the randstad local contexts are becoming more important as the impact of the process of globalisation on the spatial distribution of economic activities seems to generate not so much processes of homogenisation as of heterogenisation between regions in advanced economies the combination of specialisation and spatial concentration of economic activity in advanced economies has attracted much attention from economists and geographers here we explore at what level of spatial aggregation contemporary tendencies of clustering of economic activities articulate themselves within the archetypal polycentric urban region of the dutch randstad to examine this question we look at profiles of business start ups in the individual cities of the randstad our focus is on business start ups as they respond most directly to the changes taking place in the economic environment and especially those regarding the supply of labour our findings point to the direction of cluster formation at a supraurban level the profiles of business

nonlinearities and nonstationarities in stock returns this article addresses the question of whether recent findings of nonlinearities in high frequency financial time series have been contaminated by possible shifts in the distribution of the data it applies a recursive version of the brock dechert scheinkman statistic to daily data on two stock market indexes between january 1980 and december 1990 it is shown that october 1987 is highly influential in the characterization of the stock market dynamics and appears to correspond to a shift in the distribution of stock returns sampling experiments show that simple linear processes with shifts in variance can replicate the behavior of the tests but autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic filters are unable to do so

agglomeration economies in urban manufacturing industries a case of japanese cities abstract the effects of urban agglomeration economies on productivities in two digit manufacturing industries is estimated using the cross section data of japanese cities in 1979 urbanization and localization economies which are major forms of urban agglomeration economies are explicitly separated the estimates of these economies vary considerably among industries light industries receive more productive advantages from urbanization economies than from localization economies but heavy industries experience these economies more from localization economies than from urbanization economies

smart cafe cities testing human capital externalities in the boston metropolitan area abstract existing studies have explored only one or in some cases two mechanisms by which human capital externalities percolate at the macrogeographic levels this study however uses the 1990 massachusetts census data to test four mechanisms at the microgeographic levels in the boston metropolitan area labor market we propose that individual workers can learn from their occupational and industrial peers in the same local labor market through four channels depth of human capital stock marshallian labor market externalities jacobs labor market externalities and thickness of the local labor market we find that all types of human capital externalities are significant across census blocks different types of externalities attenuate at different speeds over distances for example the effect of human capital depth decays rapidly beyond three miles away from block centroids we conclude that knowledge spillovers are very localized within a microgeographic scope in cities that we call smart cafe cities

is specialization good for regional economic development kemeny t and storper m is specialization good for regional economic development regional studies debates about urban growth and change often centre on specialization however arguments linking specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse and sometimes conflicting claims is it better to be highly specialized or diversified does specialization refer to the absolute or relative scale of an activity in a region does specialization have static or evolutionary effects this paper investigates these questions in theoretical and empirical terms by analysing local agglomerations over time it is found that growing absolute specialization is positively linked to wages while changes in relative concentration are not significantly associated with wage dynamics

sectoral shares specialisation and metropolitan wages in the united states 1969 96 we investigate the effect of specialisation upon the level of metropolitan wage per worker specialisation is measured by the share of metropolitan earnings in each of five traded goods and services sectors sectoral specialisations are assumed to be determinants of location specific productivity which in turn is treated as a term in a metropolitan production function panel data are used for estimating that production function for 313 metropolitan areas in the us over the long period 1969 96 and two shorter periods we find that some specialisations raise average metropolitan wages some lower it and some have no effect and that the effects of specialisation differ by time period

urban diversity and economic growth at the risk of some simplification it is possible to identify four periods of intense study of cities by economists each of these has led to an increased understanding of the economics of urban areas and the unique role played by cities in the modem economy the first of these periods occurred in the decade after world war i only about ten years after the truck revolutionized the transport of goods within urban areas this period included the first systematic empirical analysis of the forces affecting the location of firms and households within cities robert murray haig 1926 and a number of other microeconomists at columbia analyzed the spatial pattems of manufacturing activity in lower manhattan and in the rest of new york city haig jmd his colleagues devoted considerable attention to where things belong in an urban area p 402 providing the first systematic economic analysis of urban spatial structure for example they analyzed the garment industry concluding that it was destined by nature to disperse north of 14th street and predicting that it would follow the estabhshed spatial pattem of the cooperage barrelmaking industry standardization in size and quality of barrels had meant that identical barrels could be made throughout the new york metropolitan area even in new jersey and the introduction of the truck meant that they could be transported cheaply throughout the region and exported the second of these periods though not in chronological order began in the mid 1960s it formalized many of the insights about location incentives within urban areas which had been uncovered a half century before mixed them with the logic of heinrich von thunen s 1826 ancient theories about agricultural crops and land values and applied them to the hotisehold sector the works of william alonso 1964

does government performance matter the effects of local government on urban outcomes in england this paper applies an extensive literature that argues that political leadership and local government activity enhance urban performance using the state of the cities database of 56 primary urban areas in england it tests for the impact of consolidated governance political stability planning performance average service performance local government capacity and planning development expenditure on jobs and population growth from 1995 to 2005 the regression analysis finds that the competence of service delivery is weakly associated with full time jobs growth and that a consolidated governance structure is weakly associated with greater population growth none of the other tests is statistically significant overall the findings place doubt on the salience of the political determinants of economic performance in english cities for the period in question

persistence in variance structural change and the garch model this article examines the persistence of the variance as measured by the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch model in stock return data in particular we investigate the extent to which persistence in variance may be overstated because of the existence of and failure to take account of deterministic structural shifts in the model both an analysis of daily stock return data and a monte carlo simulation experiment confirm the hypothesis that garch measures of persistence in variance are sensitive to this type of model misspecification

manufacturing productivity and city size in canada 1975 and 1985 does population matter this paper analyses the relationship between manufacturing productivity and city size based on canadian data for 1975 and 1985 the results differ in some respects from those of us studies in particular in canada city size appears to have a weaker impact on manufacturing productivity and an impact which is diminishing over time these findings may be a consequence of several differences in the characteristics of canadian and us firms as well as differences between the two urban systems urbanisation economies in canada may also have been weakened by regional development policies there are at the same time some striking similarities in the industries which show positive urbanisation economies in the us and canada there is also a tendency in canada for both industries with smaller firms and industries with higher rates of domestic ownership to exhibit greater urbanisation economies

multilevel approaches and the firm agglomeration ambiguity in economic growth studies empirical studies in spatial economics have shown that agglomeration economies may be a source of the uneven distribution of economic activities and economic growth across cities and regions both localization and urbanization economies are hypothesized to foster agglomeration and growth but recent meta analyses of this burgeoning body of empirical research show that the results are ambiguous recent overviews show that this ambiguity is fuelled by measurement issues and heterogeneity in terms of scale of time and space aggregation growth definitions and the functional form of the models applied alternatively in this paper we argue that ambiguity may be due to a lack of research on firm level performance in agglomerations this research is necessary because the theories that underlie agglomeration economies are microeconomic in nature hierarchical or multilevel modeling which allows micro levels and macro levels to be modeled simultaneously is becoming an increasingly common practice in the social sciences as illustrated by detailed dutch data on firm level productivity employment growth and firm survival we argue that these approaches are also suitable for reducing the ambiguity surrounding the agglomeration firm performance relationship and for addressing spatial sectoral and cross level heterogeneity