  Understanding the high-tech industrial agglomeration from a spatial-spillover
perspective is essential for cities to gain economic and technological
competitive advantages. Along with rapid urbanization and the development of
fast transportation networks, socioeconomic interactions between cities have
been ever-increasing, traditional spatial metrics are not enough to describe
actual inter-city connections. High-skilled labor flow between cities strongly
influences the high-tech industrial agglomeration, yet receives less attention.
By exploiting unique large-scale datasets and tools from complex network and
data mining, we construct an inter-city high-skilled labor flow network, which
was integrated into spatial econometric models. Our regression results indicate
that spatial-spillover effects exist in the development of high-tech industries
in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration region. Moreover, the
spatial-spillover effects are stronger among cities with a higher volume of
high-skilled labor flows than among cities with just stronger geographic
connections. Additionally, we investigate the channels for the spillover
effects and discover that inadequate local government expenses on science and
technology likely hamper the high-tech industrial agglomeration, so does the
inadequate local educational provision. The increasing foreign direct
investments in one city likely encourages the high-tech industrial
agglomeration in other cities because of the policy inertia toward traditional
industries.
