Authors: Giuseppe Arbia Patrizia Cella Giuseppe Espa Diego Giuliani
Publish Date: 2014/07/19
Volume: 48, Issue: 3, Pages: 923-937
Abstract
The potential offered by the increasing availability of microgeographic data is tremendous and still largely not exploited In this paper we propose a new methodology to study the spatial dynamics of firm demography making use of such rich source of information Exploiting the techniques of stochastic spatial point processes Diggle Statistical analysis of spatial point patterns 2003 it is indeed possible to model the firm birth growth and death explaining the behavior of the individual economic agent We consider the spatial distribution of the economic activities as the result of a dynamic process occurring in space and time and we model the microspatial patterns as single realizations of marked space–time survival point processes Rathbun and Cressie J Am Stat Assoc 891164–1174 1994 Within such a methodological framework firms are created at some random location and some point of time and then operate grow and attract or repulse the localization of other firms in their neighborhood The proposed model is fitted to some empirical data on firms’ locations sourced from the ASIA harmonised archive of the Italian National Institute of Statistics The empirical analysis reveals the presence of local competition behavior in firm creation among small retail food stores thus shedding light on the phenomena of firm demography
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