2015
Chapter
Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics

Agglomeration and Innovation

By: Gerald Carlino and William R. Kerr

Format:Print

Abstract

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities. Innovative activity tends to be more concentrated than industrial activity, and we discuss important findings from the literature about why this is so. We highlight the traits of cities (e.g., size, industrial diversity) that theoretical and empirical work link to innovation, and we discuss factors that help sustain these features (e.g., the localization of entrepreneurial finance).

Keywords

Industry Clusters; City; Innovation and Invention

Citation

Carlino, Gerald, and William R. Kerr. "Agglomeration and Innovation." Chap. 6 in Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Volume 5, edited by Gilles Duranton, J. Vernon Henderson, and William C. Strange, 349–404. Elsevier, 2015.