Quality of life is increasingly becoming a concept researched empirically and theoretically in the field of economics. In urban economics in particular, this increasing interest stems mainly from the fact that quality of life affects urban competitiveness and urban growth - research shows that...

We use national panel data at provincial level to investigate the relationship between suicide rates and socio-economic factors in Italy. The role of family, drug and alcohol consumption, social conformism and population density are the main factors in explaining the suicide rate in Italy. In a...

The paper analyzes the impact of domestic and international tourism on the economic growth process for 179 European regions. The econometric analysis is based on a spatial growth regression framework where the rate of GDP per capita growth at the regional level for the period 1999-2009 is...

The paper investigates the impact of distance, contiguity and technological proximity on cross- regional knowledge flows, by comparing the evidence concerning co-inventorship, applicant-inventor relationships and citation flows. We find evidence of significant differences across these diverse...

We study the relationship between economic development, geography and “cultural remoteness” (i.e. distance from the technological frontier(s) driving economic development) at a regional level focusing on the role of “insularity”. The analysis covers all island regions worldwide and...

This paper employs individual firm data in order to check the existence of industry-spatial effects alongside other microeconomic determinants of R&D investment. Spatial proximity is defined by a measure of firms’ industry distance based on trade intensity between sectors. The spatial model...

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model of structural change, agglomeration and growth. By assuming the same non-homothetic preference structure as Murata (2008), we obtain similar results in that a progressive reduction of trade costs allows the economy to pass from a...

The aim of this paper is to assess the role played by creativity and other components of human capital on the process of economic growth for 257 regions in the 27 member countries of the European Union. We first decompose the regional human capital endowment to distinguish between the...

We investigate the comparative technical efficiency of producer cooperatives (PCs) and conventional firms (CFs) by looking at the performance of a mixed sample of Sardinian wine producing companies over the period 2004-2009. Thanks to the similarity of the habitats in which the firms operate,...

Regional competitiveness, especially in the industrialised countries, is increasingly reliant on the availability of an adequate endowment of knowledge assets at the local level, like technological and human capital. These intangible factors enhance regional efficiency directly as inputs of the...