An information-theoretic approach to the analysis of location and co-location patterns

Alje van Dam, Andres Gomez-Lievano, Frank Neffke and Koen Frenken

No 2036, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: We propose a statistical framework to quantify location and co-location associations of economic activities using information-theoretic measures. We relate the resulting measures to existing measures of revealed comparative advantage, localization and specialization and show that they can all be seen as part of the same framework. Using a Bayesian approach, we provide measures of uncertainty of the estimated quantities. Furthermore, the information-theoretic approach can be readily extended to move beyond pairwise co-locations and instead capture multivariate associations. To illustrate the framework, we apply our measures to the co-location of occupations in US cities, showing the associations between different groups of occupations.

Keywords: pointwise mutual information; Kullback-Leiblerdivergence; revealed comparative advantage(RCA); specialization; localization; co-agglomeration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08, Revised 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg2036.pdf Version August 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: An information‐theoretic approach to the analysis of location and colocation patterns (2023)
Working Paper: An information-theoretic approach to the analysis of location and co-location patterns (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:2036

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