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Agglomeration is the tell-tale sign of cities and urbanization. Identifying and measuring agglomeration economies has been achieved by a variety of means and by various disciplines, including urban economics, quantitative geography, and regional science. Agglomeration is typically expressed as the non-linear dependence of many different urban quantities on city size, proxied by population. The identification and measurement of agglomeration effects is of course dependent on the choice of spatial units. Metropolitan areas (or their equivalent) have been the preferred spatial units for urban scaling modeling. The many issues surrounding the delineation of metropolitan areas have tended to obscure that urban scaling is principally about the measurable consequences of social and economic interactions embedded in physical space and facilitated by physical proximity and infrastructure. These generative processes obviously must exist in the spatial subcomponents of metropolitan areas. Using data for counties and urbanized areas in the United States, we show that the generative processes that give rise to scaling effects are not an artifact of metropolitan definitions and exist at smaller spatial scales.

The urban scaling framework views cities as integrated socioeconomic networks of interactions embedded in physical space. A crucial property of cities highlighted by this approach is that cities act to mix populations, a mixing both facilitated and constrained by physical infrastructure. Operationalizing a view of cities as settings for social interactions and population mixing—assembling a set of spatial units of analysis which contain the relevant social aspects of urban settlements—implies choices about the use of existing data, the assignation of data to locations, and the delineation of the boundaries of urban areas, all of which are far from trivial research decisions. Metropolitan areas have become the spatial unit of choice in urban economics and economic geography for investigating urban life as they are seen as encompassing the distinct phenomena of "urbanity" (proximity, density) and social interactions indirectly captured through a unified labor market. However, the population size and areal extent of metropolitan areas, as most often defined, render opaque the distinction between two salient types of urban population: those who work and those who reside within a metropolitan area. These two sets of individuals, among whom of course there is great overlap, putatively engage in different economic and social interactions which are in turn differently embedded in physical space. Availing ourselves of Swedish micro-level data for two distinct spatial units, tätorts ("dense localites") and local labor markets, we can distinguish which types of populations and which types of spatial agglomerations are responsible for the observed scaling effects on productivity and physical infrastructure. We find that spatially contiguous labor markets are not enough to generate some of the most salient urban scaling phenomena.

AbstractRecent scholarship on metropolitan and regional development has highlighted the importance of two factors: entrepreneurship and skilled individuals. Using micro‐level establishment data on the creation of new firms, and an occupational measure of skilled individuals (the creative class), we examine whether a metropolitan environment conducive to creative employment is also conducive to entrepreneurship (which can be seen as a creative act). Taking past growth into consideration, and allowing for annual fixed effects to account for economic cycles as well as controlling for systematic location‐specific characteristics, we find that the larger the creative employment of a region, the higher the levels of entrepreneurship and regional growth. A region that has more new entrepreneurial firms open in the previous year is more likely to have higher growth in new entrepreneurial firms in the current year.Resumen.Los estudios más recientes sobre el desarrollo regional y metropolitano han puesto de manifiesto la importancia de dos factores: el espíritu emprendedor y las habilidades individuales. Utilizando datos de establecimiento a microescala sobre la creación de nuevas empresas y una medida ocupacional de individuos con habilidades (clase creativa), estudiamos si un ambiente metropolitano con potencial para la creación de empleo tiene también potencial para que aparezca el espíritu empresarial (que puede verse como un acto creativo). Tomando en cuenta el crecimiento en el pasado, y considerando los efectos fijos anuales con respecto a los ciclos económicos, así como controlando las características sistemáticas específicas de la localización, descubrimos que cuanto mayor sea el empleo creativo de una región, mayores serán los niveles de espíritu empresarial y crecimiento regional. Es más probable que una región que haya creado más empresas emprendedoras nuevas en el año anterior tenga un crecimiento mayor en empresas emprendedoras nuevas en el año actual.

AbstractInnovation underpins the industrial way of life. It is assumed implicitly both that it will continue to do so, and that it will produce solutions to the problems we face involving climate and resources. These assumptions underlie the thinking of many economists and the political leaders whom they influence. Such a view assumes that innovation in the future will be as productive as it has been in the recent past. To test whether this is likely to be so, we investigate the productivity of innovation in the United States using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The results suggest that the conventional optimistic view may be unwarranted. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We investigate the effect of specialisation upon the level of metropolitan wage per worker. Specialisation is measured by the share of metropolitan earnings in each of five traded goods and services sectors. Sectoral specialisations are assumed to be determinants of location-specific productivity, which in turn is treated as a term in a metropolitan production function. Panel data are used for estimating that production function for 313 metropolitan areas in the US, over the long period 1969-96 and two shorter periods. We find that some specialisations raise average metropolitan wages, some lower it and some have no effect, and that the effects of specialisation differ by time-period.