This paper proposes to investigate the effect of spillovers on firms’ R&D investment decisions. We develop an analysis merging the geographer’s toolbox with standard econometric techniques. For a chosen sample of sectors, we test the existence of positive spatial autocorrelation at the level of R&D investments. We provide results on how far the local environment may influence the firms’ investm...

We seek to better understand the scheduling of activities in time through a dynamic model of commuting with congestion, in which workers care solely about leisure and consumption. Implicit preferences for the timing of the commute form endogenously due to concave preferences and temporal agglomeration economies. Equilibrium exists uniquely and is indistinguishable from that of a generalized ver...

We estimate the factors determining specialization of crop choice at the level of individual fields, distinguishing between the role of natural advantage (soil characteristics) and economies of density (scale economies achieved when farmers plant neighboring fields with the same crop). Using rich geographic data from North Dakota, including new data on crop choice collected by satellite, we est...

Sheila A. Martin is a senior economist in the Research Triangle Institute’s Center for Economics Research. She earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Iowa State University in 1992 and holds an M.A. in International Studies from the University of Kentucky. At the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, she researched industrial and rural development policy issues, including industryand plant-le...

This research analyzes manufacturing growth and decline across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan regions during the 1972–2002 period. We decompose real value added growth across local labor market areas in the lower 48 U.S. states into contributions from labor, capital, and total factor productivity. We then estimate a model describing the long-run growth of labor, capital, and productivity and ...

New theoretical work on spatial concentration of industry – particularly the ‘new economic geography’ – has significantly helped us understanding why some regions develop more than others, why cities arise and where they are located. However, this work rarely incorporates Adam Smith’s observation that spatial differences in economic activity also reflect variations in physical geography, which ...