Although it has frequently been argued that the quality of institutions affects the innovative potential of a territory, the link between institutions and innovation remains a black box. This paper aims to shed light on how institutions shape innovative capacity, by focusing on how regional...

Portuguese strategic choices regarding innovation and R&D policy have, over the past two decades, produced various positive achievements, in which the regions of Lisbon and Algarve have taken the lead, and are the only ones in the country to converge towards the European average growth rate....

The aim of this paper is to test how geographical and technological proximity relate to a particular industry's innovative output. Two mechanisms are therefore tested, i.e. agglomeration economies and the regional exploitation of technological proximity. A new dataset is applied, which includes...

We analyze the spatial diffusion of knowledge in laser technology in West Germany from 1960, when this technology began, until 2005. Laser technology research has been nearly exclusively conducted in regions that are home to a university with a physics or electrical engineering department, an...

We investigate the lead-lag relationship between growth of patent applications, growth of R&D, and growth of total sectoral employment for 270 German labour market regions over the period 1999-2005. Our unique panel dataset includes information on four two-digit industries, namely Chemistry,...

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

We analyze the emergence and spatial evolution of the German laser systems industry. Regional knowledge in the related field of laser sources, as well as the presence of universities with physics or engineering departments, is conducive to the emergence of laser systems suppliers. The regional...

We study innovation and the resulting Schumpeterian economic growth that this innovation gives rise to in a model with N heterogeneous regions. For each region i where i=1,...,N, our analysis leads to five findings. First, we define the balanced growth path (BGP) allocations and the equilibrium...

Current innovation policy is the result of decades of research about the nature and role of innovation in economic growth. Such investigation has contributed to redesign our knowledge not only on the role played by innovation in economic development but also about the relationship between...