Research Proximity and Productivity: Long-Term Evidence from Agriculture

Abstract

The spatial concentration of ideas is central to economic geography. Yet, how proximity to research affects productivity is not well studied. We use the late 19 th century establishment of agricultural experiment stations in the United States to estimate the importance of proximity to research for productivity growth. Our analysis of county-level agricultural census data from 1870 to 2000 reveals three results. First, research proximity effects from permanent station opening grew for about 20 years and then subsequently declined until becoming largely absent today. Second, proximity to station-based innovations affected local farmers' productivity for 20 to 40 years after the discovery. Third, research proximity effects remain today where stations historically focused on basic research and where nearby farmers were producing with frontier technology. Persistence in research proximity effects depend not just on research infrastructure, but also persistence in idea production and the cumulative effects of learning.

Universities and the Formation of Edge Cities: Evidence from China's Government‐led University Town Construction

“…UTs aiming at 4-year standard university education display a larger impact, UTs aiming at 3-year vocational education fail to show much impact. These results point to the existence of knowledge spillovers from university research, in line with the findings of Neil et al (1993),Woodward et al (2006),Abramovsky and Simpson (2011) andKantor and Whalley (2019).…”

“…The underlying belief of the UT strategy is that the inflow of higher education institutions can create positive spillovers and foster the geographic concentration of economic activity. A branch of literature has provided rich evidences on the various channels of the university effect on local economy (Andrews, ; Abramovsky & Simpson, ; Hausman, ; Jaffe, ; Kantor & Whalley, , ; Bania et al, ; Woodward, Figueiredo, & Guimaraes, ). However, they are all situated in developed economies.…”

Local Effects of Land Grant Colleges on Agricultural Innovation and Output

“…In Panel (b) of Kantor and Whalley (2019). 13 It should also be noted that I find similar dynamics to Kantor and Whalley (2019): as shown in Panel (d) of Figure 1, the difference between the land grant college counties and the runner-up counties is largest in the earliest decades after a college is established, before shrinking to virtually nothing; in contrast to Kantor and Whalley (2019) however, this difference is small in magnitude and statistically insignificant. 14 How to interpret the large positive coefficients for local innovation outcomes and smallin-magnitude and statistically insignificant coefficients for agricultural outcomes?…”

Have R&D Spillovers Declined in the 21st Century?

“…35 See Lychagin et al (2016) for an extensive treatment. 36 For example, Gruber and Johnson (2019) and Kantor and Whalley (2019). also be building in more rigorously how firms absorb knowledge from other countries.…”