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The Location of Industrial Innovation: Does Manufacturing Matter?

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  • Isabel Tecu

Abstract

What explains the location of industrial innovation? Economists have traditionally attempted to answer this question by studying firm-external knowledge spillovers. This paper shows that firm-internal linkages between production and R&D play an equally important role. I estimate an R&D location choice model that predicts patents by a firm in a location from R&D productivity and costs. Focusing on large R&D-performing firms in the chemical industry, an average-sized plant raises the firm’s R&D productivity in the metropolitan area by about 2.5 times. The elasticity of R&D productivity with respect to the firm’s production workers is almost as large as the elasticity with respect to total patents in the MSA, while proximity to academic R&D has no significant effect on R&D productivity in this sample. Other manufacturing industries exhibit similar results. My results cast doubt on the frequently-held view that a country can divest itself of manufacturing and specialize in innovation alone.

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  • Isabel Tecu, 2013. "The Location of Industrial Innovation: Does Manufacturing Matter?," Working Papers 13-09, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:13-09
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. Desmet, Klaus & Henderson, J. Vernon, 2015. "The Geography of Development Within Countries," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 1457-1517, Elsevier.
    3. Davide Castellani & Katiuscia Lavoratori, 2017. "Location of R&D abroad. An analysis on Global Cities," John H Dunning Centre for International Business Discussion Papers jhd-dp2017-03, Henley Business School, University of Reading.
    4. Richard B. Freeman, 2013. "One Ring to Rule Them All? Globalization of Knowledge and Knowledge Creation," NBER Working Papers 19301, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Juan Alcácer & Mercedes Delgado, 2016. "Spatial Organization of Firms and Location Choices Through the Value Chain," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(11), pages 3213-3234, November.

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