We investigate whether plants inside and outside geographic clusters differ in their resilience to adverse economic shocks. To this end, we develop a bottom-up procedure to delimit clusters using Canadian geo-coded plant-level data. Focussing on the textile and clothing industries and exploiting the series of dramatic changes faced by that sector between 2001 and 2013, we find no evidence that plants in clusters are more resilient than plants outside clusters: they are neither less likely to die nor more likely to adapt by switching their main line of business. However, conditional on switching, plants in urbanized clusters are more likely to transition to services.

Does a better cultural milieu make a city more livable for residents and improve its business environment for firms? I compute a measure of cultural specialization for 346 U.S. metropolitan areas and ask if differences in cultural environment capitalize into housing price and wage differentials. Simple correlations replicate standard results from the literature: cities that are more specialized in cultural occupations enjoy higher factor prices. Estimations using time-series data, controlling for city characteristics and correcting for endogeneity weaken the magnitude of this effect. Even though the arts and culture might be appealing to some people and firms, such determinants are not strong enough to affect factor prices at the city level.

Little is known about where hotspots of gentrification emerge within a city, and the role that some types of businesses play in the process. We develop a method to detect the sectors whose presence heralds the process of gentrification in a neighborhood. We show that these sectors, mostly found in cultural and creative industries, help to anticipate neighborhood change and that their predictive power complements that of traditional gentrification determinants. We also examine mechanisms related to amenities, worker characteristics, and signaling, which are consistent with these results. The analysis illustrates the importance of businesses in the socio-demographic dynamics of neighborhoods.

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