Do agglomerations stimulate productivity? An extensive literature on agglomeration economies, or urban increasing returns, has analyzed this question with aggregated spatial data. This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and productivity at the firm level using static and dynamic models. It makes use of a rich dataset comprising register information on all manufacturing firms in Sweden with 10 or more employees over the period 1997-2004. Three things emerge. First, firms located in larger regions are more productive when controlling for size, human capital, physical capital, ownership structure, import: and export, industry classification, and time trend. Second, results from dynamic panel estimations suggests a learning effect in that agglomeration enhances firms' productivity. Third, the role of agglomeration phenomena does not seem to have a clear coupling to firm size.

Since the contribution of Cohen et al. (2002), it is well established that linkages between firms andpublic research organisations (PROs) serve purposes of both suggesting new R&D projects andcompleting existing projects. However, the extant literature has little to say about whether these twotypes of outcomes are linked or independent effects. This paper examines how a firm’s ability toabsorb useful impulses to new R&D projects from interaction with public research organisationsdepends on how and how well the firm is able to utilise such linkages in project completion. Ananalysis of Swedish firms suggests that interaction provides impulses to further R&D primarily whenit is successfully linked to achieving objectives in ongoing R&D projects of the firm. However,linkages which are focused on contributions to short-term projects are less likely to generate usefulimpulses. Moreover, not only are linkages which support both long-term and short-term objectivesbetter than linkages which solely serve short-term objectives; firm-PRO linkages in which short-termobjectives play a less accented role are most likely to facilitate valuable impulses to further R&D andinnovation.

The issue—how a firm’s R&D (Research and Development) interaction with universities affects its innovation performance—remains under-researched. This study explores the relationship between firms’ collaboration with universities and their capabilities for innovation, as perceived by R&D managers. Drawing on a series of interviews with R&D managers of 45 randomly selected firms collaborating with two research universities in Sweden, we explicitly recognize mechanisms through which university relationships contribute to successful R&D management.

This paper examines how the institutional set-up of public research organisations (PROs) affects how firms are able to utilise direct interaction with publicly employed researchers. We argue that the role that PRO interaction has to play in the firm’s innovation processes depend on the organisational and cognitive distances between the firm and the PRO. In particular, this paper empirically explores how Swedish engineering firms assess the value of R&D partnerships with universities and research institutes. Our theoretical discussion of organizational distance suggests that managers should perceive institute contacts to be more strongly associated with short-term R&D projects than university contacts. This hypothesis cannot be verified. Following from our discussion of cognitive distance, we find that firms with advanced R&D capabilities obtain differential benefits. Their interaction with universities provides impulses for innovation and offers opportunities to learn to a greater extent than contacts with public research institutes. However, firms with less advanced R&D capabilities perceive no significant differences between university and institute interaction. Thus, both organizational and cognitive distance affect firms’ interactions with PROs, and our results have implications for the current push in Europe to reform universities and institutes.

An important characteristic of the economic development in Europe and North America during the last few decades is a fast expansion of the business-service sector. The present paper aims at modeling the location dynamics of three categories of firms: (i) knowledge-intensive business-service firms, (ii) ordinary business-service firms and other firms, where the latter form the rest of the economy. In the theoretical framework, business-service firms have random-choice preferences and respond in a non-linear way to time distances in their contact efforts to customer firms. Business-service firms make their location decisions in response to local, intra-regional and extra-regional access to market demand. The econometric analysis makes use of information about time distances between zones in urban areas as well as between urban areas in the same agglomeration and between urban areas in different agglomerations. The empirical analysis shows how the number of jobs in the different sectors change in response to accessibility to purchasing power. The estimation results show that the change processes feature non-linear dependencies with varying spatial reach.