The Role of Transport Induced Agglomeration Effects on Firm Productivity in Mega-City regions: Evidence for Bassin Parisien

摘要

This paper undertakes empirical analysis of the relationship between productivity and transportinduced agglomeration effects within the context of a Mega-City region, Bassin Parisien. To the bestof our knowledge, this is the first study in the French context to produce elasticities of urbanagglomeration economies for different industry sectors. Furthermore, our measure of agglomerationexplicitly takes account of accessibility to economic mass in terms of driving times. This study is thefirst attempt to investigate the presence of nonlinearities in the relationship between productivity andagglomeration using French data. The findings indicate that transport induced agglomeration effectsdiffer across industry groups, and are greater for business services, which is in line with existingevidence for other countries. The results also suggest that there is considerable nonlinearity in therelations between productivity and transport induced agglomeration effects, implying that theconventional estimation of country-level aggregate elasticities is likely to misrepresent the actualmagnitude of any productivity gains from agglomeration.