A GEOGRAPHY OF U.S. INSTITUTIONAL INVESTMENT, 1990

This paper examines the geography of institutional stock ownership for 603 major publicly traded companies. Linkages between cities are created using the stockownership levels between headquarters cities of investors and headquarters cities of firms. Both cartographic and statistical methods show that the urban connections describe a highly selective network of high-order urban centers. New York City is the dominant city, followed by Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. A simple gravity model, used to test the level of the effect of space on market perfection, explains a substantial portion of the investment-defined network. Differences between the levels of investment by different classes of institutional investors also are revealed.