Michael Storper

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Luskin School of Public Affairs

The large labor markets of big prosperous cities offer greater possibilities for workers to gain skills and experience through successively better employment opportunities. This "experience effect" contributes to the higher average wages that are found in big urban areas compared to the economy as a whole. Racial wage inequality is also higher in b...

Social scientists and policymakers alike have become increasingly concerned with understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of inter-regional inequality in economic living conditions. Contemporary spatial inequality is multi-faceted—it varies depending on how we define inequality, the scale at which it is measured, and which groups in the l...

A growing literature within economic geography has been documenting the increasing skill and wage polarization within and across metropolitan areas in the US. This work has provided evidence that skill-biased technological changes in the second half of the 20th century made way to a significant upwards shift in the demand coupled with productivity...

This article examines the role of work at the cutting of technological change—frontier work—as a driver of prosperity and spatial income inequality. Using new methods and data, we analyze the geography and incomes of frontier workers from 1880 to 2019. Initially, frontier work is concentrated in a set of ‘seedbed’ locations, contributing to rising...

Mike Davis's relationship to urban studies involved a combination of positivist analysis, history, and poetics. His contribution to the City of Quartz is assessed from this triple perspective. His role as the poet of LA's anguishing and complex nature takes its place alongside more conventional academic scholars, filmmakers, musicians, and artists....

This paper examines the role of work at the cutting of technological change – frontier work – as a driver of prosperity and spatial income inequality. Using new methods and data, we analyze the geography and incomes of frontier workers from 1880 to 2019. Initially, frontier work is concentrated in a set of ‘seedbed’ locations, contributing to risin...

Although technological change is widely credited as driving the last 200 years of economic growth, its role in shaping patterns of inequality remains under-explored. Drawing parallels across two industrial revolutions in the United States, this paper provides new evidence of a relationship between highly disruptive forms of innovation and spatial i...

The concept of regional development trap refers to regions that face significant structural challenges in retrieving past dynamism or improving prosperity for their residents. This article introduces and measures the concept of the regional development trap for regions in Europe. The concept draws inspiration from the middle-income trap in internat...

Spatial income disparities have increased in the United States since 1980. Growth in this form of inequality is linked to major social, economic and political challenges. Yet, contemporary patterns, and how they relate to those of the past, remain insufficiently well understood. Building on population survey microdata spanning 1940-2019, this paper...

This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic, fiscal, social and political fallout on cities and metropolitan regions. We assess the effect of the pandemic on urban economic geography at the intra- and inter-regional geographic scales in the context of four main forces: the social scarring instilled by the pandem...

This paper presents new evidence on long-run patterns of interregional inequality in the United States. The evidence points to a fundamental shift from convergence to divergence, prompting a reconsideration of theory. The paper augments existing demand-side theories, linking them to historical perspectives on disruptive innovation and industrial re...

This paper presents new evidence on U.S. interregional inequality between 1860 and 2017. This evidence indicates that the economic geography of the U.S. has undergone periodic alternations between convergence and divergence, a fact not well explained by existing theory. In response, we articulate a theory of alternating waves, where major technolog...

Há um crescente debate nas últimas décadas sobre o alcance e a substância da teoria urbana. O debate tem sido marcado por muitas afirmações diferentes sobre a natureza das cidades, incluindo declarações de que o urbano é um conceito incoerente, que a sociedade urbana é nada menos do que a sociedade moderna como um todo, que a escala urbana não pode...

Os estudos urbanos atualmente são marcados por muitos debates ativos. Em um artigo anterior, abordamos alguns desses debates propondo um conceito fundamental de urbanização e de forma urbana para identificar uma linguagem comum para a pesquisa urbana. No presente trabalho, faremos uma breve recapitulação desse quadro. Utilizaremos então este materi...

As an economy undergoes structural change, the focus of innovation changes to different technologies and different industries. Innovation is uneven over time and over places, leading to a tendency for incomes to diverge between innovative places and less innovative places, and to selectivity or turbulence in the pattern of employment and income cha...

Book review of "The Rise of the Hybrid Domain: Collaborative Governance for Social Innovation."

This book forum reports an outcome of the authors-meet-the-critics session organized for the 2016 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, which took place coincidentally but appropriately, in San Francisco.

Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The u...

Urban studies today is marked by many active debates. In an earlier paper, we addressed some of these debates by proposing a foundational concept of urbanisation and urban form as a way of identifying a common language for urban research. In the present paper we provide a brief recapitulation of that framework. We then use this preliminary material...

Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively farther behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The u...

Os textos presentes no livro “Globalização, Fragmentação e Reforma Urbana: o futuro das cidades brasileiras na crise” é resultado no seminário realizado sob o mesmo título, em 1993, pelo IPPUR/UFRJ e pela Federação de Órgãos para Assistência Social e Educação – FASE. O seminário teve como objetivo a reflexão sobre as mudanças emergentes da sociedad...

The sources of economic divergence lie in their divergent levels and types of economic specialization. Specialization is caused by many forces, including lucky breakthroughs in technology, particular powerful individuals, decisions of key firms at critical turning points, and lock-in effects from initial advantages. Most of these forces cannot be p...

The chapter assesses the contributions of regional science and urban economics, the new economic geography, and the institutional approaches found in economics, sociology, and political science to the analysis of urban economic development. The concept of development clubs should guide empirical identification of city-regions that are in different...

Economic development is geographically uneven; incomes differ widely across places. After a long period during which incomes tended to become more even across cities and regions within developed countries, they are now diverging again. In 1970, the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles regions had very similar per capita incomes; in 2012,...

Innumerable forces influence economic development, and research on it uses many different methods and comes from several disciplines. Four theoretical fields that contribute to understanding divergent economic development of city regions are development theory, regional science and urban economics, the new economic geography, and the social science...

The specialization of urban regions in different tradable industries is the source of significant differences in wages and income levels. Los Angeles was more specialized than San Francisco in 1970 but considerably less specialized in 2010. During this period, San Francisco consolidated its specialization in activities related to information techno...

Regional economic development is shaped by many policies, which are implemented by national governments, regional and state governments, and local governments. But local economic development policies in Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area since 1970 had little to do with the economic divergence of these two regions. In reality, many...

Dominant beliefs—those of political and economic entrepreneurs in a position to make policies—over time result in the accretion of an elaborate structure of institutions that determine economic and political performance. This chapter documents the worldviews and beliefs of regional leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles since...

Networks of people and organizations create “invisible colleges” in labor markets, industries, communities, and political leadership. They influence who gets access to other people and hence to implementing ideas and finding resources. This chapter measures the corporate, philanthropic, and leadership networks of the San Francisco Bay Area and Grea...

Differences in average regional wages between San Francisco and Los Angeles increased from 5 percent in 1970 to 35 percent in 2010. Wage gaps are due partially to increasing differences in the skills of the labor force but are proportionally greater than the increase in skills gaps. Skills gaps themselves must also be explained. Do they emerge as d...

High-wage specialization comes from a complex sequence involving entrepreneurship, encouragement by local robust actors or leaders, breakthrough innovations, new organizational practices, the emergence of supportive overall relational infrastructure and networks, the proliferation of new specialized brokers and dealmakers, the diffusion of conventi...

Industries, firms, and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and Los Angeles did not plan the economic divergence of their regions. They faced challenges from the restructuring of the Old Economy and benefited from the opportunities of the New Economy. Their successes and failures widened the income gap between the two regions. This chapter presents compar...

In 1970, the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco had almost identical levels of income per resident. In 2010, the San Francisco Bay Area was almost one third richer than Los Angeles, which had slipped from 4th rank among cities in the United States to 25th. The usual reasons for explaining such change—good or bad luck, different typ...

Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively farther behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The u...

Debates about urban growth and change often centre on specialization. However, arguments linking specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse, and sometimes conflicting, claims. Is it better to be highly specialized or diversified? Does specialization refer to the absolute or relative scale of an activity in a region? Does sp...

There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be sepa...

A ‘digital skin’ of the city is coming into being. This skin consists of a sensored and metered urban environment. The urban world is becoming a platform for generating data on the workings of human society, human interactions with the physical environment and manifold economic, political and social processes. The advent of the digital skin opens u...

I am going to make an admission in beginning my comments: that Gordon Clark's article is outside of my normal filed of expertise. I do economic grography, in a more conventional sense, and I do not have, as perhaps Clark might say, a high level of "financial literacy". (first lines)

This paper combines the perspective of an international economist with that of an economic geographer to reflect on how and to what extent the Internet will affect the location of economic activity. Even after the very substantial transportation and communication improvements during the 20th Century, most exchanges of physical goods continue to tak...

This article analyses the geography of innovation in China and India. Using a tailor-made panel database for regions in these two countries, we show that both countries exhibit increasingly strong polarization of innovative capacity in a limited number of urban areas. But the factors behind this polarization and the strong contrasts in innovative c...

The twenty‐first century will be one of intensified urbanization, on a scale never before experienced. How do urban systems and individual cities change and develop? The social sciences have many different approaches to analyzing the economic, social, and spatial dimensions of urban change. We inventory some of these approaches and their implicatio...

This paper asks whether worker utility levels - composed of wages, rents, and amenities - are being equalized among American cities. Using microdata on U.S. urban workers in 1980 and 2000, little evidence of equalization is found. Comparable workers earn higher real wages in large cities, where amenities are also concentrated. Moreover, population...

Since the reform of the Structural Funds in 1989, the EU has made the principle of cohesion one of its key policies. Much of the language of European cohesion policy eschews the idea of tradeoffs between efficiency and equity, suggesting it is possible to maximise overall growth whilst also achieving continuous convergence in outcomes and productiv...

Research on the institutional foundations of economic development is sharply divided between those who emphasize rule-bound systems of exchange (‘society’), and those who stress the importance of informal or voluntary bonds between individuals or small groups (‘community’). This paper reports an exploratory effort to operationalize the concepts of...

Explaining the growth and change of regions and cities is one of the great challenges for social science. The field of economic geography and associated economics has developed frameworks in recent years that, while tackling major questions in spatial economic development, are deficient in their ability to explain geographical develop in a causal w...

Human geography is in a unique position to understand how local structural factors shape social, political, and ultimately economic outcomes. Indeed, the discipline has had much to say about the interaction between local institutions and the economy in general, and about how the broader institutions of society influence local economic development....

What is a 'just' or 'equitable' territorial distribution of resources or economic and social development? As in the other social sciences, the normative dimensions of territorial development - of what would constitute 'just' cities, regions and global patterns of development - cover the process of resource creation and allocation, as well as the ge...

This paper takes issue with Paul Krugman's claim that the New Economic Geography should be considered 'now middle-aged'. The New Economic Geography can be updated to account for current developments in advanced economies, notably innovation-driven agglomeration and urbanization. The New Economic Geography also needs improvement in its ability to ad...

Why are there persistent differences in income between metropolitan areas? The answer to this question has evaded much of the scholarship on the topic. Some of the frameworks that drive empirical research in this field are based on ad hoc combinations of explanatory factors, ranging from natural climate, to business climate, to land and labour cost...

The field of spatial economics has made enormous progress in theorizing and measuring agglomeration effects, trade costs, and urbanization. Typical models establish structural determinants by making strong assumptions about which forces are relevant and how these forces interact. But many of these assumptions, about firms, agents, spatial costs, an...

Arguing for the growing importance of the 'labour factor' in the determination of capital location, the authors examine the nature of labour supply and demand and the labour process. They propose a new theory of employment and job creation and conclude that location is an essential means of shaping employment relations.-after Editor

Industrialization efforts in much of the Third World during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, based principally on import substitution policies, attempted to transfer one model of industrialization, Fordist mass production, to certain regions. The technological and organizational character of mass production was such that it was, in purely technical terms, a...

Do jobs follow people or do people follow jobs? A number of currently prominent approaches to urbanization respond to this question by privileging the role of individual locational choice in response to amenity values as the motor of contemporary urban growth. Amenities, it is often said, have an especially potent effect on the migration patterns o...

abstractHow should we think of the role of regions in relation to the global economy? Theory has surprising gaps when it comes to building a unified vision of these two scales of development. Two contributions to such a vision are proposed in this article. First, the relationship between geographic concentration and the regional economic specializa...

Community has a problematic relationship to economics. In general, contemporary political economics holds that groups have strongly negative effects on economic efficiency and growth, because groups bind individuals into situations where they can no longer realize their preferences, exit freely, and find effective representation for their interests...

Much literature suggests that knowledge-production activities are still heavily dependent upon geographically proximate sources of information, in spite of rapid development in telecommunications technology. Some analysts believe that the importance of proximity in knowledge production will eventually disappear with the continued development of tel...

Flexible Specialisation and Post-Fordist IndustrialisationThe Rise and Fall of Mass-Production Methods in the Film IndustryConclusion NotesReferences

While transport costs have fallen, the empirical evidence also points at rising total trade costs. In a model of industry location with endogenous transaction costs that seeks to replicate features from the machinery industry, we show how and under which conditions a decline in transport costs can lead to an increase in the total cost of trade. The...

Globalization and the Institutions of Economic DevelopmentMainstream Arguments about Globalization and Their SilencesReframing the Question: Territories and FlowsThe Dynamics of GlobalizationHierarchy, Regulation, and Competition: Institutional Dilemmas

Three principal theories of urban success are prominent among policy-makers today. The first holds that "global cities" are more successful than other cities, though they also have many problems that come from being globally-connected. A second theory asserts that having a higher "quality of life" is somehow a factor in urban economic success. And...

The United States and European Union differ significantly in terms of their innovative capacity: the former have been able to gain and maintain world leadership in innovation and technology while the latter continues to lag. Notwithstanding the magnitude of this innovation gap and the political emphasis placed upon it on both sides of the Atlantic,...

The United States and European Union differ significantly in terms of their innovative capacity: the former have been able to gain and maintain world leadership in innovation and technology while the latter continues to lag. Notwithstanding the magnitude of this innovation gap and the political emphasis placed upon it on both sides of the Atlantic,...

The United States and European Union differ significantly in terms of theirinnovative capacity: the former have been able to gain and maintain world leadership in innovation and technology while the latter continues to lag. Notwithstanding the magnitude of this innovation gap and the political emphasis placed upon it on both sides of the Atlantic,...

This critical addition to the growing literature on innovation contains extensive analyses of the institutional and spatial aspects of innovation. Written by leading scholars in the fields of economic geography, innovation studies, planning, and technology policy, the fourteen chapters cover conceptual and measurement issues in innovation and relev...

Contemporary social science remains quite divided about the type of coordination that allows some groups of agents to carry out successful economic development and which distinguishes them from cases of failure. In some cases, it is said to be traditional or non-market forms of coordination, such family, networks, or shared traditions: these are "c...

Regional economies are synergy-laden systems of physical and relational assets, and intensifying globalization is making this situation more and not less the case. As such, regions are an essential dimension of the development process, not just in the more advanced countries but also in less-developed parts of the world. Development theorists have...

This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT)--we find strong evidence of moderate risk aversion. Once we...

The resurgence of big, old cities and their regions took urban theory by surprise. A great deficiency of much urban theory is that it is static, partial, and backward-looking. As such, it has few tools to understand large-scale, medium-term change in complex systems such as cities. Explaining such changes requires realistic assumptions about the be...

Regional economies are synergy-laden systems of physical and relational assets, and intensifying globalization is making this situation more and not less the case. As such, regions are an essential dimension of the development process, not just in the more advanced countries but also in less-developed parts of the world. Development theorists have...

Recounts the attempt by big business, led by Dow Chemicals, to erode the ability of environmentalist, labour and state officials to control the actions of industry. Demonstrates the strength of anti-regulatory ideology and the overall ineffectiveness of environmental legislation. -after Authors

This special issue contains papers by both economists and geographers on agglomeration and growth. In this introduction, we first provide a brief sketch of recent developments in the interaction between economists and geographers. We then propose some contextual background to make it easier for geographers to approach the economics papers of this i...

Studies of economic development and economic history have long been concerned with the relationship between the transparent and supposedly anonymous forces of markets, rules and bureaucracies, on the one hand, and membership in groups, such as local communities, associations, or networks. For some, they are necessary underpinnings for the market, p...

Much of the literature on the impact of institutions on economic development has focused on the tradeoffs between society and community as mutually opposed forms of institutional coordination. On the one hand, sociologists, geographers, and some economists have stressed the positive economic externalities that are associated with the development of...

Faculties of Economics and Sociology, October 2002, to the SPURS Geography of Innovation Seminar at MIT, February 2003, to the NOLD Doctoral School in Troms?, Norway, April 2003, and to the Hettner Lectures in Heidelberg, June 2003.The field research which stimulated this paper was carried out jointly with Lena Lavinas (Federal University of Rio de...

This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features: it is an efficient communication technology; it can help solve incentive problems; it can facilitate socialization and learning; and it provides...

Trade and location theory identifies forces that could lead to locational dispersion (comparative advantage) or locational concentration (scale economies) in the face of globalizing markets, each with different consequences for specialization and the adjustment costs associated with integration. However, these forces can play themselves out in very...

Theories of competitiveness abound today, as do descriptive monikers for the new economy: post-industrialism, the informational economy, the knowledge-based economy, flexible specialization, post-Fordism. Though each of these labels helps in understanding some dimensions of contemporary economic activity, the logic of the most advanced forms of eco...

This paper combines the perspective of an international economist with that of an economic geographer to reflect on how and to what extent the Internet will affect the location of economic activity. Even after the very substantial transportation and communication improvements during the 20th Century, most exchanges of physical goods continue to tak...