Agglomeration economies, firm heterogeneity, and foreign direct investment in the United States
研究了集聚经济中企业异质性如何影响其从集聚中获得的净收益，发现技术、人力资本等较弱的企业更倾向于地理集聚，而较强的企业则相反，并通过美国制造业外资绿地的选址和生存数据验证了这一观点。
An overlooked aspect of agglomeration economies, which are positive externalities that stem from the geographic clustering of industry, is that firms contribute to the externality in addition to benefiting from the externality. This insight suggests that if firms are heterogeneous they will differ in the net benefits they receive from agglomerating. We argue that firms with the best technologies, human capital, training programs, suppliers, or distributors will gain little, yet competitively suffer when their technologies, employees, and access to supporting industries spill over to competitors. Therefore, these firms have little motivation to geographically cluster despite the existence of agglomeration economies. Conversely, firms with the weakest technologies, human capital, training programs, suppliers, or distributors have little to lose and a lot to gain; therefore, these firms are motivated to geographically cluster. As a result, when firms are heterogeneous we expect agglomeration to be characterized by adverse selection. We find supportive evidence of these arguments by examining the location choice and survival of foreign greenfield investments in U.S. manufacturing industries. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.