Agglomeration and Innovation

Gerald  Carlino; William R. Kerr

Chapter | Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics | 2015

Agglomeration and Innovation

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; Innovation and Invention; Industry Clusters; City; Innovation and Invention;

Format: Print

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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.

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Agglomeration and Innovation

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