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AbstractThis paper is about the role played by the stock of human capital on location decisions of new manufacturing plants. I analyse the effect of several skill levels (from basic school to PhD) on decisions about the location of plants in various industries and, therefore, of different technological levels. I also test whether spatial aggregation level biases the results and determines the most appropriate areas to be considered in the analyses of these phenomena. My main statistical source is the Register of Manufacturing Establishments of Catalonia, which has plant‐level microdata on the locations of new manufacturing plants.

AbstractIncreasingly, economies that have traditionally benefited from offshoring are losing some of their strategical advantages, with a consequent increase in backshoring by developed economies. This paper describes the phenomenon and tries to shed light on the current challenges, trends, and debates in the area, and on the main determinants of backshoring. A new phenomenon known as nearshoring is also analysed—this consists of relocating some previously offshored manufacturing activities so that they are now close to previous core locations, but not so close as to suffer from disagglomeration effects. This combines the advantages of offshoring and backshoring.

The aim of this paper is to track the location decisions of knowledge-intense firms in a redeveloped urban district in the city of Barcelona in which government policy has promoted the formation of a cluster of knowledge-based activities. After decades of economic and industrial stagnation in a district called Poblenou, in the year 2000 the City Council of Barcelona implemented a plan to renew the area's urban and economic structure. Under the development plan, knowledge-based firms were encouraged to set up in the area creating a cluster of Advanced activities. This paper examines the success of this local policy and aims to determine whether cluster amenities have played a part in attracting knowledge-based activities. First, we evaluate the cluster implementation via a differences-in-differences analysis comparing the increase in the number of knowledge-based firms in this specific area with the increase of this kind of firm elsewhere in the city and the metropolitan area. Second, to test whether cluster amenities are determinant factors for the location of knowledge-based firms, we perform a multivariate regression analysis explaining intra-city firm location at the ZIP code level. Data about new firms come from a business-census that contains detailed information about location determinants of these firms as well as their characteristics.

The objective of this paper is to analyse the influence of agglomeration economies on location decisions taken by new firms inside metropolitan areas. As we assume that these economies differ according to firms' level of technology, our sample comprises new firms from high, intermediate and low technology industries. We are particularly interested in analysing the effects of agglomeration economies that are felt over very short distances (inside the metropolitan areas. We introduce in our estimation the effect of the central city as a determinant for the location of new firms in the rest of the metropolitan area.

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el efecto de la accesibilidad a la red de carreteras de alta capacidad sobre las decisiones de localización de establecimientos manufactureros en los municipios de la Comunidad de Madrid (España). Para ello se lleva a cabo un análisis exploratorio espacial y un análisis de regresión donde se comparan los resultados obtenidos para los municipios madrileños y su área de influencia con los del conjunto de municipios españoles peninsulares. Los resultados obtenidos confirman la relevancia de la accesibilidad como factor locacional.

AbstractThis paper considers the estimation of the geographical scope of industrial location determinants. While previous studies impose strong assumptions on the weighting scheme of the spatial neighbour matrix, we propose a flexible parametrisation that allows for different (distance‐based) definitions of neighbourhood and different weights to the neighbours. In particular, we estimate how far can reach indirect marginal effects and discuss how to report them. We also show that the use of smooth transition functions provides tools for policy analysis that are not available in the traditional threshold modelling.