This paper estimates the impact of road improvements on firm employment and productivity using plant level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured by changes in employment accessibility along the road network. These changes are constructed using data on...

The paper decomposes a geographical concentration index to examine the temporal scope of a spillover, which is the period of time over which one firm’s activity directly affects the location of other firms’ activities. Natural advantages are fixed over reasonably long time periods, but if...

This article analyses the geography of innovation in China and India. Using a tailor-made panel database for regions in these two countries, we show that both countries exhibit increasingly strong polarization of innovative capacity in a limited number of urban areas. But the factors behind this...

i. This discussion paper is a completely revised version of SERCDP0047, published April 2010. This paper argues that agglomeration externalities are important even in the rural periphery. The analysis focuses on the forced relocation of more than a tenth of the Finnish population after World War...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multi-region model of economic geography that we use to understand the general equilibrium implications of transportation...

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE) theory, in which wages relate to employment density. The paper makes an...

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what...

Debates about urban growth and change often center on specialization.However, arguments linking specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse, and sometimes conflicting, claims. Is it better to be highly specialized or diversified? Does specialization refer to the absolute...

We analyze the impact of the establishment of a GBP 380 million basic scientific research facility in the UK on the geographical distribution of related research. We investigate whether the siting of the Diamond Light Source, a 3rd generation synchrotron light source, in Oxfordshire induced a...

This paper examines census-derived commuting data for the world’s earliest major urbanindustrial region, now home to 10 million people. Owing its origins to water power from the Pennine rivers, this region now comprises many closely-spaced cities and towns whose distinct identities have been...