Does It Matter Where You Are? The Importance of Being Locolised in the Academic World.

This paper was inspired by the renaissance that industrial localisation and localised external economies have experienced during the last years. We seek to elucidate the relevance of the theories on localisation and external economies for those that have indeed developed them - the economists. In doing so, we take a closer look at possible determinants of individual and departmental performance, and thereby focus in particular on the importance of localisation in the academic world. Our main hypothesis is that, being at a department ranked as good, improves an economist's performance, so that an academic cluster might be just as important to its incumbents as an industrial cluster to firms.