“Unravelling the forces of urban industrial agglomeration” – Neave O’Clery

As early as the 1920's Marshall suggested that firms co-locate in cities to reduce the costs of moving goods, people, and ideas. These 'forces of agglomeration' have given rise, for example, to the high tech clusters of San Francisco and Boston, and the automobile cluster in Detroit. Yet, despite its importance for city planners and industrial policy-makers, until recently there has been little success in estimating the relative importance of each Marshallian channel to the location decisions of firms.
In this lecture Dr. Neave O'Clery will explore the burgeoning literature that aims to exploit the co-location patterns of industries in cities in order to disentangle the relationship between industry co-agglomeration and customer/supplier, labour and idea sharing. Building on previous approaches that focus on across- and between-industry estimates, Neave and her team propose a network-based method to estimate the relative importance of each Marshallian channel at a meso scale. Specifically, community detection technique is used to construct a hierarchical decomposition of the full set of industries into clusters based on co-agglomeration patterns, and show that these industry clusters exhibit distinct patterns in terms of their relative reliance on individual Marshallian channels.

Dr. Neave O'Clery is currently a Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford where she is leading the development of a new research programme on Urban Dynamics and Policy. Neave completed her PhD in mathematics at Imperial College in 2013 where she focused on the intersection between network structure or topology, and dynamics. Now her work focuses on studying the processes underlying economic development and the emergence of complexity for cities, often using tools from graph theory and network science. Moreover, Neave was Fulbright Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Development (CID) at the Harvard Kennedy School (2013-16).