AREUEA invites you to a virtual seminar.

Date: Wednesday September 6th at 11:00 AM Eastern Time

Speaker:  Andra Ghent (University of Utah)

Paper Title: The Best Cities for Firms

Abstract: We examine the spatial distribution of jobs within firms to understand how city characteristics affect employment. Our approach allows us to control for firm-by-year fixed effects such that we can disentangle the potential shared fortunes of cities and the firms that operate there. Since there is a mechanical relationship between a city's population and employment in firms that produce nontradable output, we propose a new way of identifying firms producing tradables to better understand which city characteristics increase productivity. Our most robust findings are that physical city size and employment density drive employment even after controlling for firm selection. For tradable firms, we find employment increases with the industrial diversity of a city indicating that industrial diversity increases productivity. We find strikingly different patterns in the drivers of employment in nontradable firms suggesting that what drives population may differ from what drives productivity.

Registration Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZdqcR7oSTKaMeoJ1z_qO_Q