If you’re a woman looking for a taxi in New York and you prefer to be driven by another female, there’s a new livery service that will be right up your street. Launching Sept. 16 in New York City, Westchester County, and Long Island, SheTaxis—or SheRides in New York City—will make female drivers available exclusively for women riders.  The goal is to accommodate women who prefer the company of drivers of the same gender, or may feel uncomfortable being driven by men. The service will take ride requests through an app and dispatch drivers wearing hot-pink scarves made of pashmina. The app will be available through Apple initially and eventually via Android devices. Stella Mateo, who is starting the service, says it also will help more women join the male-dominated taxi business.

The Philadelphia Federal Reserve reports:  Over the past two decades, research in this field has particularly surged.  Substantial data is now available to better study these questions. It also surely has some connection to the growth of the knowledge economy, the fascination with Silicon Valley and related clusters, and similar popular themes. Particularly encouraging is the extensive set of connections being made from economic geography to adjacent fields such as labor economics, entrepreneurial finance, and business management.

Much, however, remains to be accomplished. With the handful of important exceptions reviewed previously, we still have not opened the black box of how clusters operate.  Better empirical guidance about the microinteractions within clusters with respect to innovation will allow us to differentiate among models and build stronger theoretical frameworks. Fortunately, the data are within reach to do so. Many employer–employee data sets are being linked to information on innovation (e.g., inventor identifiers), and these data sets often allow precise spatial coordinates of firms. This should prove a powerful lever for seeing further inside local areas, and it is likely that the line of work will increasingly draw upon network theory.

We also need better insight into the long-term nature of agglomeration and innovation—the life cycles of innovative places. This is true within countries—innovation cores have shifted between Detroit, Boston, Silicon Valley, etc., and will continue to do so—but also true across countries. How does the rise of Bangalore impact Boston? Does the development of global innovation centers in rapidly emerging countries complement or substitute for those in advanced economies? The study of agglomeration and innovation is exciting because we are starting to make some progress at understanding the local and global nature of these phenomena.

What can local policymakers do to foster agglomeration and innovation in their cities. This is a big and difficult question, and we are right to be cautious that we do not have all the answers. However, governments have spent billions of dollars on this, and many will continue to fund “be the next Silicon Valley” initiatives. This is true in advanced economies, in nations currently looking to transition from resource-dependent to a knowledge-based economy, in developing countries looking to leapfrog growth stages, and everywhere in between. Economists must continue to provide insight on these critical matters, and ideally our insights will get sharper faster.   Agglomeration and Innovation

From their lows of 2006, business defaults peaked in 2008 followed by a three-year period of considerable improvement. They have continued to improve since then and are now at their lowest levels in ten years broadly mirroring the Federal Reserve’s statistics on commercial lending. The drop in default rates is most likely the result of a combination of factors.  Lenders have cleaned up their books so there are fewer defaults from “previous” exposures.

Lenders have tightened standards so new exposures are to stronger businesses that default at a lower rate.  General business conditions have improved and businesses are better positioned to meet their financial obligations.  Borrowers have dropped out of the “traditional” credit markets discouraged that the cumbersome application process would most likely result in a rejection.

• There are surprising differences in credit quality between businesses of different size.  Solos—sole proprietorships, self-employed and other businesses without employees have the lowest default rate. Ignored from most statistics because of their less than four percent share of total business receipts, they directly impact the lives of over 20 million people and generate nearly a trillion dollars in receipts.
• E100—businesses employing fewer than 100 and more than 20 have the highest default rate. They are a diverse group, squeezed in the middle, financially independent of the owner/operator, informationally opaque, and too small for special attention by the financial markets.
• E20’s are the credit quality gems. Employing fewer than 20, they are the true small businesses and largely underserved by the credit markets.
• E100+ businesses account for the bulk of business employment and receipts and garner the most attention. As a group, their default rate is similar to that of their smaller counterparts—E20’s.
• There are opportunities for better serving the credit needs of businesses.
• E20 businesses represent an attractive segment for alternative lenders.
• Solos deserve another look. Lenders’ traditional approaches might be shutting out a potentially vibrant, growing and profitable segment of borrowers.
• 

The main thing that prevents octopus farming at large scale is that the common octopus – Octopus vulgaris – is tough to feed in captivity, especially when first born.

After hatching, octopuses first exist as tiny organisms known as paralarvae, drifting around the upper ocean in among clouds of plankton which they feed on. It is this stage – before they become fully fledged young adults and descend further into the sea – which is hardest to replicate in aquaculture.  Feeding octopuses adequately during their first two months of life is a challenge.  At an industrial scale, the only possible solution is to take wild juveniles caught at sea and grow them in floating sea cages. Fishermen start with individuals of about 800 grams and grow them until they are more than 2-3kg, supplying them with crustaceans and low value fish over a period of three or four months.

Fishermen cooperatives in north-western Spain grow octopus in sea-cages. They sell them at high season – Christmas and summer – where large creatures can reach €10-12 per kilo, double the usual price. So far, research has allowed small-scale production by artisanal producers in Vigo, Galicia, reaching a production of just ten metric tons per year.

But this system is highly dependent on the success of the initial catches; without a good crop of smaller octopuses to grow in the cages, end results will always be limited. This is why farmed-raised octopus hasn’t had commercial success yet.

Over the past 15 years the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO) in Vigo has carried out important and successful research to overcome the problems with octopus cultivation, and the institute is now focused on rearing octopus across a full life cycle – from hatch to catch. In fact they managed to complete full cultivation across the life cycle of several octopuses in 2001.

This experiment was achieved after using live crustacean larvae known as zoeae as prey along with the commonly used artemia, a brine shrimp. However, it is very difficult to obtain these zoeae in large quantities, making large-scale production prohibitively expensive.

What makes octopuses find larvae so tasty (or at least edible). Once identified, the idea is to ensure the cultured enriched artemia has the same features.

But once the octopus is up to a certain size, there is another step to be solved: the transition between paralarvae and juvenile. This stage is another mortality peak in octopus farms.

Working with other species that don’t have a paralarvae phase would help, such as the Mexican Four-Eyed Octopus – known scientifically as Octopus maya. Like cuttlefish, these octopuses hatch ready for the deep seas, with all the same features as their adult selves. There is still a transition phase of sorts though, when they still need commercial feed pellets to grow adequately.

Octopus maya cultivation represents the most advanced attempts at commercially sound cephalopod aquaculture. But even with this species, it has been necessary to rely on targeting a specialized gourmet-level market. In conclusion, the best octopus farms can’t yet compewith the common wild-captured product.

Developments in feeding products and techniques over the next few years will be key. Once small octopuses can be fed in large numbers, the development of a full undersea farming industry will be much easier.

The tasting room is packed at Orpheus Brewing. The heady aroma of hops and barley hangs in the warm evening air as casually dressed 20- and 30-somethings gather around highboy tables and spill out onto the wood-planked patio overlooking Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. Already there’s a gentle buzz, although it’s hard to tell whether the buzz is a side effect of the artisanal brews on tap or simply the excitement surrounding the latest addition to the city’s burgeoning craft beer market. Scenes like this are becoming more common across the Southeast as craft beer takes hold in a region long dominated by national brands and light lagers.  The Atlanta Fed report.  Atlanta Fed Report on Craft Beer