Networking off Madison Avenue
利用曼哈顿广告代理行业的普查数据，发现邻近同行数量对生产率有显著正向影响，但这种效应随距离急剧衰减，且收益主要体现为租金而非工资，挑战了仅用工资方程推断集聚收益的文献。
This paper studies the advertising agency industry in Manhattan to infer networking benefits among agencies in close spatial proximity. We use economic census data that allow us to distinguish locations at a fine level of geographic detail, so as to infer the strong effect on productivity of having more near advertising agency neighbours. Paying close attention to identification issues, we show, however, that there is extremely rapid spatial decay in the benefits of more near neighbours, even in the close quarters of southern Manhattan, a finding that is new to the literature. This suggests that high density of similar commercial establishments is important in enhancing local productivity for those industries found in large cities, where information sharing plays a critical role. Our results indicate that the benefits of more near neighbours are largely capitalized into rents rather than wages, challenging an existing literature, which estimates wage equations alone to infer agglomeration benefits. Copyright 2008, Wiley-Blackwell.