This paper gives an overview of research on economic clusters and clustering and is motivated by the growing intellectual and political interest for the subject. Functional regions have the features that agglomeration of economic activities i.e. clusters, benefit from. Functional regions have...

Human capital is observed to be an important contributor to growth but unevenly distributed geographically. While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human...

Research on human capital generally focuses on the regional level, and neglects the relative effects of its distribution between center cities and surrounding suburbs. This research examines the effects of this intra-metropolitan distribution on economic performance. The findings indicate that...

In this paper, we analyse where people who become self-employed actually start their firms. In the entrepreneurship literature, it is generally assumed that individuals who start a firm start it where they live. We question this general assumption and show that this does not hold for commuters....

While there is a general consensus on the importance of human capital to regional development, debate has emerged around two key issues. The first involves the efficacy of educational versus occupational measures (i.e. the creative class) of human capital, while the second revolves around the...

This paper examines the effects of human capital on the growth and survival of a large sample of Swedish businesses. Human capital is represented by conventional measures of the educational attainment and experience of an establishment’s workers, and skills-based measures of the types of...