A dynamic approach to the tendency of industries to cluster

It is often stressed that industries could benefit from being co-located in space. This implies that we should be able to observe location dependencies between related industries. In this paper, the tendency of (i) manufacturing industries, (ii) input suppliers and (iii) business services to be co-located is studied. The employment in these industries is seen as being determined simultaneously, i.e. the employment in manufacturing industries is a function of the employment in business services and input suppliers and vice versa. To account for this interdependency a simultaneous-equations model à la Carlino-Mills (1989) is employed for estimation. The employment in the three industries is endogenous variables in the model. The study is based on employment data across Swedish municipalities 1993-2000. Accessibility based on time distance is incorporated into the analysis to allow for inter-municipal effects. The method allows for an assessment of the question of the tendency for these industries to cluster. Also, due to the simultaneous elements in the model, it indicates which synergy-effects are likely to take place as a result of increased employment in one of the industries, which is important from a policy perspective.

The role of accessibility for regional innovation systems

The link between proximity and innovation has been dwelled upon extensively in the literature. A regional economic milieu characterized by proximity between relevant actors is maintained to be suitable for establishing and maintaining successful regional innovation system. In this paper it is proposed that the relevant link to be studied is rather that between accessibility and innovation. Although accessibility is a key factor in facilitating the processes stressed to be important for innovations, the relationship between accessibility and innovation is surprisingly unexploited. Scrutinization of the relationship between accessibility and innovation is necessary in order to fully comprehend regional innovative capacity. Furthermore, such scrutinization will shed further light in the issue of the importance of knolwedge spillovers.

Technology and Trade - an analysis of technology specialization and export flows

This paper examines how technology specialization, measured by citations-weighted patents, affects trade flows. The paper analyzes (i) the relationship between technology specialization and export specialization across regions and (ii) how the technology specialization of origin and destination affect the size and structure of link-specific export flows. We find that the export specialization of a region typically corresponds to the region’s technology specialization, which supports the view that comparative advantages can be created by investments in technology and knowledge. Export flows from regions to destination countries with similar technology specialization as the origin regions consist of commodities of higher quality in the specific technology, as indicated by higher prices. Highly specialized regions export more and charge higher prices. The results of the paper suggest that an understanding of trade ultimately requires an understanding of the spatial pattern of investments in (and creation of) technology and knowledge, as such investments shape export specialization patterns and the corresponding composition of export flows between locations across space.exports; technology; knowledge; specialization; quality; patents

Characteristics and Performance of New Firms and Spinoffs in Sweden

We analyze the rate of formation, the characteristics, and the performance of different types of new firms in Sweden over a decade. Comparisons to Denmark, Brazil, and the U.S. suggest that the environment for new firm formation in Sweden is not markedly different than elsewhere. In line with previous studies, spinoffs of incumbents perform better than other types of new firms, particularly if their parent firm continues to operate. A novel findings is that the rate of employment growth of spinoffs is greater the larger the size of their parent, which contrast sharply with findings for firms with a single owner.Sweden; spinoffs; new firm formation; entrepreneurship; performance; employment growth

Company R&D and University R&D - How Are They Related?

At the same time as we can observe strong tendencies of a globalisation of R&D, we also can observe a strong spatial clustering of R&D and related innovative activities. The standard explanation in the literature of the clustering of innovative activities is that such clusters offer external knowledge economies to innovative companies, since they are dependent upon knowledge flows and that knowledge flows are spatially bounded. Obviously, location is crucial in understanding knowledge flows and knowledge production, since knowledge sources have been found to be geographically concentrated. There are two major performers of R&D: industry and universities. It seems rather straight-forward to assume that industrial R&D might be attracted to locate near research universities doing R&D in fields relevant to industry. Already as far back as in the 1960s a number of case studies confirmed the important roles played by Stanford University and MIT for commercial innovation and entrepreneurship. During the years a large number of formal studies have presented evidences of a positive impact of university R&D on firm performance. The question is, does it also work the other way around? Does industrial R&D function as an attractor for university R&D? We may actually think of several reasons why university R&D may grow close to industry R&D. First of all political decision-makers may decide to start or expand university R&D at locations where industry already is doing R&D. Secondly, we can imagine that industry doing R&D in a region might use part of their R&D funds to finance university R&D. Thirdly, universities in regions with industrial R&D might find it easier to attract R&D funds from national and international sources due to co-operation with industry. Obviously, not all types of university R&D attract industrial R&D. There are reasons to believe that, in particular, university R&D in natural, technical and medical sciences attracts industrial R&D but that there are also strong reasons to believe that there are variations between different sectors of industry regarding how dependent their R&D is to be located close to university R&D. The above implies that there are behavioural relationships between industrial R&D and university R&D and vice versa. However, the litrature contains few studies dealing with this problem. Most studies have concentrated on the one-directional effect from university R&D to industrial R&D and the outputs of industrial R&D in most cases measured in terms of the number of patents and neglected the possible mutual interaction. However, if there is a mutual interaction between university and industry R&D, and if there are knowledge externalities involved, then we can develop a dynamic explanation to the clustering of innovative activities based on positive feedback loops. This would imply strong tendencies to path dependency and that policy initiatives to transfer non-innovative regions to innovative regions would have small chances to succeed. The fact that knowledge flows seem to be spatially bounded implies that proximity matters. Most contributions analysing spatial knowledge flows have used very crude measures of proximity. However, there are some authors that have argued that proximity could be measured using accessibility measures. Accessibility measures can be used to model interaction opportunities at different spatial scales: local, intra-regional and inter-regional. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the locational relationship between industry R&D and university R&D in Sweden using a simultaneous equation approach and to analyse existing differences between different science areas and different industry sectors.