From Neighborhoods to Nations: The Economics of Social Interactions
本书结合城市经济学与社会互动文献，从理论和实证角度探讨本地互动如何产生外部效应，对理解城市存在和经济表现至关重要。
Cities exist because proximity facilitates interactions between economic agents. There are few, if any, fundamental issues in urban economics that do not hinge in some way on reciprocal action or influence between or among workers and firms. Thus, the localization of industry arises from intra-industry knowledge spillovers in Marshall (1890), while the transmission of ideas arises through local inter-industry interaction that fosters innovation in Jacobs (1969). In fact, the face-to-face interactions that Jacobs emphasizes are believed to be so critical to cities that Gaspar and Glaeser (1997) (and others) have asked whether advances in communication and information technology might make cities obsolete. While there is broad agreement that nonmarket interactions are essential to cities and important for economic performance more broadly, the mechanisms through which local interactions generate external effects are not well understood. To better understand these issues, this book brings together the urban economics and the social interactions literature both from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Despite the fundamental importance of the underlying questions, this book is a lone star in the literature. It has no equivalent. There are some books dealing with urban economics and economic geography (Fujita, 1989; Zenou, 2009; Fujita and Thisse, 2013), others with social/network economics (Goyal, 2007; Jackson, 2008; Benhabib et al., 2011; Jackson and Zenou, 2013) but none with both aspects.