ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we seek to investigate the direct relationship between the types of linkages between firms and industries and observed patterns of spatial industrial concentration. We do this by combining information about business locations with data on industry linkages to characterize the "spatially binding ties" within identified economic clusters. Specifically, we use a point process model and enterprise-level data to isolate the sectors that drive observed spatial clustering of the US printing and publishing value chain. Our effort is purposely exploratory, with our goal as much to develop a workable methodological approach as it is to understand the spatial dynamics of the printing and publishing industry. We do not claim that our input-output based method of characterizing linkages between industries and firms is ideal. But we do argue that meshing a pre-defined specification of the economic relationship between firms in a given region with systematic empirical analysis of observed co-location can contribute important insights to the analysis of agglomeration, firm networks, and regional growth.
