The main objective of this paper is to assess the role of a large set of factors which potentially relate agglomeration economies to local growth. Such a relationship is analysed thanks to an ample database on the case of Italy which refers to 784 Local Labour Systems and 34 sectors (21...

The growing interest on the economic geography issues has provided new vigour to the research efforts aiming at explaining economic phenomena without neglecting space. In particular several studies have focused on the role of spatially bounded externalities on firms agglomeration processes at...

A vast body of literature has addressed in the last decade the influence of local externalities on industry location and growth. This literature has, however, paid not too much attention to the wider scenario where such phenomena are rooted, that of an ongoing process of structural change which...

Following the literature on the comparative advantage of small versus large banks at lending to small businesses, and in light of the worldwide decline in the number of intermediaries that specialize in this type of lending associated with deregulation in the banking industry, we examine the...

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...