Estimates of the impact of static and dynamic knowledge spillovers on regional factor productivity

We develop an empirical approach to examine static and dynamic knowledge externalities in the context of a regional total factor productivity relationship. Static externalities refer to current period scale or industry-size effects which have been labeled localization externalities or region-size effects known as agglomeration externalities. Dynamic externalities refer to the relationship between accumulated or prior period knowledge and current levels of innovation, where past learning-by-doing makes innovation positively related to cumulative production over time. Our empirical specification allows for the presence of both static and dynamic externalities, and provides a way to assess the relative magnitude of spillovers associated with spillovers from these two types of knowledge externalities. The magnitude of own-region impacts and other-region (spillovers) can be assessed using scalar summary measures of the own- and cross-partial derivatives from the model. We find evidence supporting the presence of dynamic externalities as well as static, and our estimates suggest that dynamic externalities may have a larger magnitude of impact than static externalities.