Most quantitative research on the determinants of technological innovation has focused on factors endogenous to the industry, firm, plant, or production process. The largely case study-based research on industrial districts has emphasized the positive impacts on firm performance of embeddedness into local concentrations of similar productive activity. This research has not explicitly examined locational factors affecting firm performance. This study will attempt to formally model the ways in which the spatial and institutional context conditions the impacts of technical, economic, and organizational variables on the performance of manufacturing establishments in the metalworking sector of the economy. It will investigate the extent to which variations among U.S. counties in sameness, diversity, access, and business leadership help to explain inter- plant variation in efficiency, technological innovation, and plant survival. Data will come from two panel surveys of over 1000 establishments, the U.S. Census of Manufactures, and corporate data base files. Several hypotheses will be tested with multivariate statistical techniques. This study promises to yield significant new information, and it will test a new theory on the interplay between inter- organizational structures and spatial context. It will implement new empirical measures of the extent to which agglomeration influences the performance of manufacturing firms in the U.S.
