Resum:
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The aim of this article is to assess the effects of several territorial
characteristics, specifically agglomeration economies, on industrial location
processes in the Spanish region of Catalonia. Theoretically, the level of
agglomeration causes economies which favour the location of new
establishments, but an excessive level of agglomeration might cause
diseconomies, since congestion effects arise. The empirical evidence on this
matter is inconclusive, probably because the models used so far are not
suitable enough. We use a more flexible semiparametric specification, which
allows us to study the nonlinear relationship between the different types of
agglomeration levels and location processes. Our main statistical source is the
REIC (Catalan Manufacturing Establishments Register), which has plant-level
microdata on location of new industrial establishments. Keywords: agglomeration economies, industrial location, Generalized Additive
Models, nonparametric estimation, count data models. |