Organizational Attributes and the Distribution of Rewards in a Region: Managerial Firms vs. Knowledge Clusters Articles uri icon

authors

  • GIARRATANA, MARCO
  • GAMBARDELLA ., ALFONSO

publication date

  • March 2010

start page

  • 573

end page

  • 586

issue

  • 2

volume

  • 21

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1047-7039

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1526-5455

abstract

  • This paper expands the organization theory and evidence on regional industrial agglomerations. We define regional economic activities according to the attributes of the
    organizations that populate a region and investigate how organizational
    characteristics
    influence macro-outcomes at a regional economic
    level. We focus on two dimensions emerging from two widely known
    organizational
    forms: the managerial corporation and the knowledge
    cluster with a marked orientation toward interfirm knowledge
    spillovers.
    We use an original data set of 146 U.S. cities to
    obtain variations in the extent to which they are populated by
    managerial
    firms or knowledge clusters. By utilizing
    city-level measures of managerial salaries, we test how the intensity of
    managerial
    corporation versus knowledge cluster
    characteristics affects the mean and dispersion of the "rewards" of
    cities. Our evidence
    suggests that higher managerial corporate
    characteristics lower the variability of rewards, while they have no
    effect on the
    mean of rewards. Higher-knowledge cluster
    characteristics produce both higher dispersion and higher expected
    rewards. We explain
    these results by looking at the different learning
    mechanisms of the two organizational types. In so doing, we highlight
    the
    role of intra- and interfirm knowledge processes as
    important sources of differences in the rewards of the two models. From
    an empirical point of view, results are confirmed
    using both patent-based and skill mobility-based measures of knowledge
    spillovers.