Creative and Digital Industries RMG Seminar with Roberto Camerani, Monica Masucci, Sawan Rathi, and Josh Siepel

Title: The Resilience of Creative Microclusters During Crises

Speakers: Roberto Camerani, Monica Masucci, Sawan Rathi and Josh Siepel, University of Sussex

Abstract:

Firms in the creative industries are well-known to be organized in clusters and are particularly reliant upon close-knit production networks and sensitive to urban agglomeration. In this paper, we explore the extent to which highly localized agglomerations affect regional resilience. Emerging literature highlights the importance of microgeographies, particularly creative ‘microclusters’ at the street, neighborhood, or town level, as distinct from creative ‘clusters’ at the city level. It suggests businesses in these microclusters may have distinct characteristics from traditionally conceived clusters identified at the city level. In this paper we use evidence from the UK to suggest that local networks, trust, and knowledge spillovers within microclusters, as opposed to clusters, caused these areas to be particularly resilient to crises such as COVID-19. We use official labor market statistics in the UK at a fine-grained MSOA (Medium Super Output Area) level from 2016 to 2022. Using difference-in-differences techniques, we show that during COVID-19, the number of employees in MSOAs that were part of creative microclusters grew by 9.15 percent compared to non-microcluster MSOAs. The effect holds for microclusters but does not hold for creative clusters, suggesting that microclusters were uniquely resilient compared to clusters more broadly. To understand the mechanism of this resilience, we used survey data from 900 UK creative firms conducted pre-pandemic. We find that companies in microclusters are more likely to sell primarily to businesses, their clients are more likely to be located locally, and they are more likely to place higher value on proximity to customers and other firms in the same sector. We argue, therefore that these local supply chains provided the source of resilience and growth as the UK emerged from the pandemic. These findings about the importance of microgeographies for resilience have substantial implications for our understanding of drivers of resilience in light of disruptions to distributed global supply chains.

Bios:

Roberto Camerani

https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p184042-roberto-camerani

Monica Masucci

https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p283461-monica-masucci

Sawan Rathi

https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p575494-sawan-rathi

Josh Siepel

https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p166461-josh-siepel