The Dynamics of Local Employment in France

By Pierre-Philippe Combes, T. Magnac, Jean-Marc Robin. Social Science Research Network, 2004

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the impact of local economic structure on employment dynamics. Local employment is decomposed into the product of the average plant size and the number of plants in the area and industry. We estimate the dynamics of both components simultaneously using French yearly data on 36 industries and 341 areas between 1984 and 1993. The careful specification of short-run dynamics and the control for fixed effects and endogeneity are shown to be critical in the empirical model. First, static externalities are prevalent compared to dynamic ones. Moreover, whereas area-and-industry effects explain most of the spatial variation of plant size, the local number of plants is mainly driven by the current local economic structure. Policies targeted towards plant creation should thus be more efficient. For instance, large areas endowed with a small number of even size industries have both more and larger plants. A large number of plants heterogeneous in size also increases the average plant size, but the number of plants is higher when plants have similar size.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35c9151fa4150cba58a124f4ce75b046a7231603

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Citations in the corpus

The impact of aging and technological relatedness on agglomeration externalities: a survival analysis (2012, unknown): “In many articles (e.g., Henderson et al., 1995; Henderson, 1997; Combes et al., 2004), findings suggest that localization externalities play an important role.”
The Identification of Agglomeration Economies (2011, methodology): “This strategy dates back to Henderson (1997) and was later applied, sometimes with some methodological twists, by Henderson (2003), Combes, Magnac, and Robin (2004), and Martin, Mayer, and Meyneris (2008).”
Sectoral Agglomeration Economies in a Panel of European Regions (2008, methodology): “Combes et al. (2004) and Blien et al. (2006) report employment growth regressions using disaggregated regional data for France and Germany respectively.”
Local Employment Growth in West Germany - A Dynamic Panel Approach (2005, unknown): “, , 1 , , ) ln( s z s t z s t z irt wage a W S X β ε − + ′ ′ ′ ′ ′ = + + + (10)”
Racing with or Against the Machine? Evidence from Europe (2016, unknown): “This finding is similar to previous results at the regional (Cingano and Schivardi, 2004; Combes et al., 2004) and industry level (Appelbaum and Schettkat, 1999; Blien and Sanner, 2014) and has been discussed already by Neisser (1942).”
The Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities in the EU (2003, background): “Indeed, as argued in Combes et al. (2002), higher productivity implies larger employment only if the demand elasticity is sufficiently large and if the substitution of other inputs for labour is not too important.”
The Impact of Related Variety on Regional Employment Growth in Finland 1993–2006: High-Tech versus Medium/Low-Tech (2012, background): “The balance between the two depends on various factors, such as demand elasticity (e.g. Combes et al., 2004), but this all makes it less likely that a positive effect of low-and-medium-tech related variety will be found.”
The Empirics of Agglomeration Economies (2014, unknown): “Two main types of specification involving determinants of agglomeration economies have been estimated that way: dynamic specifications of employment at the city-industry level (Henderson, 1997; Combes et al., 2004) and static or dynamic specifications of TFP or wages (Henderson, 2003; Mion, 2004; Gr”