Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance

Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter, Scott Stern

NBER Working Paper No. 18250
Issued in July 2012

---- Acknowledgements -----

This paper has benefited greatly from the sustained research by Richard Bryden and Weifeng Weng in assembling the US Cluster Mapping Project dataset. Ben Jones, Jim Davis, Juan Alcacer, Bill Kerr, Matthew Kahn, Jim Dana, Wayne Gray, Megan MacGarvie, Anita McGahan, Alex Bryson, Iain Cockburn, Ram Mudambi, and Christian Ketels contributed helpful suggestions. We are particularly grateful for many insightful comments by participants in the NBER Productivity Lunch Series, the Research Seminar at IESE Business School, the NBER Summer Institute (IPE group), and the North American Regional Science Association International meetings. Mercedes Delgado gratefully acknowledges support from the Kauffman Foundation and the Innovation Policy group at the NBER. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau or the National Bureau of Economic Research. All results have been reviewed to ensure that no confidential information is disclosed. The authors at various times have made compensated presentations at meetings that focused on issues of clusters and economic performance, using the data and results presented in the enclosed paper. This research was supported in part by the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.

return to bibliography page