Every once in a while, national governments face difficult decision problems regarding financial support of important domestic firms or even entire national national industries. Similar problems are often faced by regional or urban governments. Given these problems, it is important to get...

Shift-Share analysis is a well-known methodology frequently used to obtain insights into the determinants of regional growth processes. It can address many issues, such as output growth, employment growth and productivity growth. After the initial equation proposed by Dunn (1960), several...

Business-to-consumer (b2c) e-commerce can be regarded as a disruptive process innovation that can make existing business models obsolete. B2c e-commerce provides retailers the possibility of a new service concept, new client interface and even delivery system. The history of retailing is replete...

During the past two decades, evolutionary economics has emerged as one of the innovative fields of research in economics, and in particular in the fields of the economics of technical change and theory of the firm (Nelson and Winter 1982; Dosi et al. 1988; Arthur 1994; Dosi et al. 2000). Parts of their...

We explain employment growth in 40 Dutch regions for the period 1996-2002. Our main interest is to test the effect of sectoral variety using data on five-digit sector employment, while controlling for traditional variables. Our measure of variety is entropy, as this measure allows for...

This paper explains the main commonalities and differences between neoclassical, institutional and evolutionary approaches that have been influential in economic geography during the last couple of decades. For all three approaches, we argue that they are in agreement in some respects and in...

The present paper presents a geosimulation agent-based model of firm development that is based on firms’ behavioural rules. The model describes growth, closure, spin-offs and relocation of firms in 21 industrial sectors in the Netherlands, based on a dataset of all individual firms in...

The geography of innovation has established itself as a central subject in economic geography. Geographical proximity to firms and organizations like universities is supposed to have a positive effect on a firms’ innovative performance. One of the reasons causing these positive...

Economic development has become understood as being crucially dependent on knowledge production and innovation. Two important features of knowledge production concern its spatial concentration and its embeddedness in collaborative networks. The understanding of economic and scientific...