Description:
This paper presents the findings of a study on the decline of a typical Marshallian industrial district: the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter (UK). The paper contributes to the current debate on clusters' life cycle, by presenting a multidisciplinary methodology that combines historical and economic analyses with demography and organisational ecology models. We seek to explore the patterns of firms' birth and mortality rates, as well as firm density across branches of production activities in the Jewellery Quarter to better understand its shift from maturity to its more recent decline.