We use the historical self-employment rate as an indicator of a regional culture of entrepreneurship and link this measure to economic growth in recent periods. The results indicate that German regions with a high level of entrepreneurship in the mid-1920s have higher start-up rates about 80...

We investigate the persistence of levels of self-employment and new business formation in different time periods and under different framework conditions. The analysis shows that high levels of regional self-employment and new business formation tend to be persistent for periods as long as 80...

Concepts like regional innovation systems, innovative milieu, and learning regions emphasize the positive contribution of intra-regional cooperation to firmsÕ innovation performance. Despite substantial numbers of case studies, the quantitative empirical evidence for this claim is thin. Using...

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...

This study explores the worldwide spatial evolution of scientific knowledge production in biotechnology in the period 1986-2008. We employ new methodology that identifies new key topics in biotech on the basis of frequent use of title worlds in major biotech journals as an indication of new...

This paper investigates the impact of scientific relatedness on knowledge dynamics in biotech at the city level during the period 1989-2008. We assess the extent to which the emergence of new research topics and the disappearance of existing topics in cities are dependent on their degree of...

Measuring the innovation performance of regions or nations has been repeatedly done in the literature. What is missing in the literature is a discussion of what innovation performance of a region means. How do regions or nations contribute really to the innovation output of firms? And how can...

A growing body of work emphasizes the importance of regional factors for regional innovativeness. In this paper, about seventy variables approximating the social-economic characteristics of regions are aggregated to twelve regional factors. In four industry-specific set-ups their influence on...

This paper studies the impact of an existing industrial structure in a region on the number of start-ups in this region. The aim is to detect path-dependencies in the regional industry structure. To this end we study empirically the regional factors that influence start-up rates. The approach...