Related papers: Is Productivity Advantage of Cities Really Down To…
There are many benefits and costs that come from people and firms clustering together in space. Agglomeration economies, in particular, are the manifestation of centripetal forces that make larger cities disproportionately more wealthy than…
The performance of cluster computing depends on how concurrent jobs share multiple data center resource types like CPU, RAM and disk storage. Recent research has discussed efficiency and fairness requirements and identified a number of…
Industries learn productivity improvements from their suppliers. The observed empirical importance of these interactions, often omitted by input-output models, mandates larger attention. This article embeds interdependent total factor…
This paper critically investigates standard total factor productivity (TFP) measurement in the public sector, where output information is often incomplete or distorted. The analysis reveals fundamental paradoxes under three common output…
Understanding how spatial configurations of economic activity emerge is important when formulating spatial planning and economic policy. A simple model was proposed by Simon, who assumed that firms grow at a rate proportional to their size,…
Recent studies have found evidence of a negative association between economic complexity and inequality at the country level. Moreover, evidence suggests that sophisticated economies tend to outsource products that are less desirable (e.g.…
The relationships between diversity, productivity and scale determine much of the structure and robustness of complex biological and social systems. While arguments for the link between specialization and productivity are common, diversity…
What drives formal employment creation in developing cities? We find that larger cities, home to an abundant set of complex industries, employ a larger share of their working age population in formal jobs. We propose a hypothesis to explain…
Agglomeration economies are a persistent subject of debate among economists and urban planners. Their definition turns on whether or not larger cities and regions are more efficient and more productive than smaller ones. We complement…
Many large cities are found at locations with certain first nature advantages. Yet, those exogenous locational features may not be the most potent forces governing the spatial pattern of cities. In particular, population size, spacing and…
Estimating the capabilities, or inputs of production, that drive and constrain the economic development of urban areas has remained a challenging goal. We posit that capabilities are instantiated in the complexity and sophistication of…
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) affects to a great extent the output and productivity growth. Evidence suggests that investment growth in ICT has rapidly accelerated the TFP (total factor productivity) growth within the…
Is the large influence that mutual funds assert on the U.S. financial system spread across many funds, or is it is concentrated in only a few? We argue that the dominant economic factor that determines this is market efficiency, which…
Although it has been suggested that the shift from on-site work to telework will change the city structure, the mechanism of this change is not clear. This study clarifies how the location of firms changes when the cost of teleworking…
We study the scaling of (i) numbers of workers and aggregate incomes by occupational categories against city size, and (ii) total incomes against numbers of workers in different occupations, across the functional metropolitan areas of…
As early as the 1920's Marshall suggested that firms co-locate in cities to reduce the costs of moving goods, people, and ideas. These 'forces of agglomeration' have given rise, for example, to the high tech clusters of San Francisco and…
The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on…
Over the years, the growing availability of extensive datasets about registered patents allowed researchers to better understand technological innovation drivers. In this work, we investigate how the technological contents of patents…
Understanding cities is central to addressing major global challenges from climate and health to economic resilience. Although increasingly perceived as fundamental socio-economic units, the detailed fabric of urban economic activities is…
We study several models of growth driven by innovation and imitation by a continuum of firms, focusing on the interaction between the two. We first investigate a model on a technology ladder where innovation and imitation combine to…