Human Capital and Knowledge-Intensive Industries Location: Evidence from Soviet Legacy in Russia

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: HSE University (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050716000802
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 736-768
• 关键词: internal migration; market thickness; service; cities; IMPACT; decentralization; PRODUCTIVITY; INNOVATION; hierarchy; geography

摘要

Do human capital endowments trump location for knowledge-intensive industries? This article takes advantage of a natural experiment created by the end of the Soviet planned economy in 1991, which had geographically distributed R&D manpower according to planned needs as opposed to a distribution determined by a market economy. It examines the extent to which the planned economy created a path-dependence in the location of post-Soviet human-capital intensive production. The study finds that regions with more R&D personnel in 1991 did better in the development of modern market-oriented knowledge-intensive business services, like engineering and IT. Several explanations are offered for this path-dependence, with an emphasis on human capital externalities being the most plausible.