Skills in the city

Entrepreneurs and cities: Complexity, thickness and balance

“…This complexity-based hierarchy is obviously quite different than the classic internal economies-of-scale based central place theory offered by Christaller (1933). 9 The positive correlations between city size and education (Berry and Glaeser (2005)) or skills (Bacolod et al (2009)) and between agglomeration and innovation (as discussed above)…”

Agglomeration Theory with Heterogeneous Agents

“…However, Table 4.1 shows that there is a negative and significant relationship 6 How to conceive of "skills" or "talent" is a difficult empirical question. There is a crucial distinction to be made between horizontal skills and vertical talent (education), as emphasized by Bacolod et al (2009aBacolod et al ( ,b, 2010. That distinction is important for empirical work or for microfoundations of urban agglomeration economies, but less so for our purpose of dealing with cities from a macro perspective.…”

“…We subtract 1/2 from the rank as in Gabaix and Ibragimov (2011). understand how the four causes (heterogeneous fundamentals, agglomeration economies, and the sorting and selection of heterogeneous agents) interact to shape the two moments (average and dispersion) of the productivity and income distributions, consider the following simple example. Assume that more talented individuals, or individuals with better cognitive skills, gain more from being located in larger cities (Bacolod et al, 2009a). The reasons may be that larger cities are places of intense knowledge exchange, that better cognitive skills allow individuals to absorb and process more information, that information is more valuable in bigger markets, or any combination of these.…”

Heterogeneous skills and homogeneous land: segmentation and agglomeration

“…According to Bacolod et al (2009), workers at the top and bottom of the skill distribution are attracted by large cities. However, these authors also find that average skill levels are higher in large cities, although their estimated correlation of skills and size is only of modest magnitude.…”

“…Baldwin and Okubo (2006) embedded firm heterogeneity in a standard new economic geography framework in order to show that the biggest region attracts the most productive firms, 3 since these firms benefit more from backward and forward linkages in 1 There is a huge body of empirical studies on the relationship between size/density and productivity/wages including Sveikauskas (1975), Ciccone and Hall (1996), Glaeser and Mare (2001), Wheaton and Lewis (2002), Syverson (2004), Lee (2005), Wheeler (2006), Fu and Ross (2007), Combes et al (2008), and Bacolod et al (2009). For surveys, see Rosenthal and Strange (2004) and, more recently, Strange (2009).…”