Tales of the city: what do agglomeration cases tell us about agglomeration in general?
研究了集聚经济的异质性微观基础，利用英国97个制造业部门的数据，在统一框架下估计劳动力池、投入共享和知识溢出等马歇尔力量的重要性，发现这些力量在行业间差异显著，因此从案例外推需谨慎。
Abstract This article considers the heterogeneous microfoundations of agglomeration economies. It studies the co-location of industries to look for evidence of labour pooling, input sharing and knowledge spillovers. The novel contribution of the article is that it estimates single-industry models using a common empirical framework that exploits the cross-sectional variation in how one industry co-locates with the other industries in the economy. This unified approach yields evidence on the relative importance of the Marshallian microfoundations at the single-industry level, allowing for like-for-like cross-industry comparisons on the determinants of agglomeration. Using UK data, we estimate such microfoundation models for 97 manufacturing sectors, including the classic agglomeration cases of automobiles, computers, cutlery and textiles. These four cases—as with all of the individual industry models we estimate—clearly show the importance of the Marshallian forces. However, they also highlight how the importance of these forces varies across industries—implying that extrapolation from cases should be viewed with caution. The article concludes with an investigation of the pattern of heterogeneity. The degree of an industry’s clustering (localisation), entrepreneurship, incumbent firm size and worker education are shown to contribute to the pattern of heterogeneous microfoundations.