Towards an understanding of knowledge spillovers in industrial clusters

Abstract

Since Marshall's contribution on the localization of economic activities, increased consideration has been given to geography in economics. This study focuses on the relationships between industrial clustering and knowledge spillovers. It illustrates empirically that, even in the condition of serendipitous business interactions among nearby firms, knowledge spillovers are diffused unevenly and within restricted subgroups of firms.

Notes

¹ For a more in-depth discussion of this issue, see Giuliani (forthcoming).

² The lists of firms are drawn from official sources: the SAG (Servicio Agricola y Ganadero) for Chile and the provinces of Pisa and Livorno for Italy. Further screening by key informants has also been performed.

³ Note that Table 1 also reports results for the aggregated matrix data (Aggregate). This matrix has been constructed by pooling together clusters’ level network data.

⁴ See Pagan and Ullah (1999) for a description of the model. The kernel function used is the Epanenchnikov density with 0.371 as bandwidth. The estimate has been performed by a software package called gbutils developed by G. Bottazzi and available at www.sssup.it/~bottazzi/