Finding proper policy instruments to promote productivity growth features prominently on the Lisbon agenda and is central in many national as well as European policy debates. In view of the increased mobility of high-skilled workers in Europe, ongoing globalization and increased interregional...

There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a simulation-based econometric methodology which allows us to estimate the model in the structural form...

This paper studies the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on national economic growth with the help of GMM panel regressions. Effects on productivity growth, capital and labor inputs as well as innovation activities are distinguished. Furthermore, less and more developed countries as...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of inequality on economic growth. Both theoretical and empirical approaches have produced ambiguous results on sign and size of this relationship. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality...

This paper studies the correlation between inequality, measured by the Gini coefficent of incomes, and the growth rate of per capita GDP in a panel of countries between the late 1950s and late 1990s. Inequality Granger causes growth with a negative coefficient, while growth Granger causes...

This paper studies the effects of public research (publications) and innovation output (patents) on national economic growth with the help of a GMM panel regression including 114 countries. Effects on productivity growth and capital and labor inputs are distinguished. Furthermore, different time...

The importance of knowledge spillovers for achieving innovation and economic growth is widely recognized. It is not straightforward which type of spillovers is most effective: intra-sectoral spillovers or inter-sectoral spillovers. We investigate this controversy using a model of regional...

Innovation and technological change are central to the quest for regional development. In the globally-connected knowledge-driven economy, the relevance of agglomeration forces that rely on proximity continues to increase, paradoxically despite declining real costs of information, communication...

This paper employs firm-level data to analyze the relative importance of firm characteristics and agglomeration externalities in explaining variation in innovation rates across firms. More specifically, we combine micro-data and census data to estimate the probability that a firm will introduce...

This paper examines regional effects of the InnoRegio program, which was conducted by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The InnoRegio program has been a new tool of innovation policy with the aim to improve innovativeness in East Germany on the basis of prosperous regional...