We explain the spatial concentration of economic activity, in a model of economic geography, when the cost of environmental policy - which is increasing in the concentration of emissions - and an immobile production factor act as centrifugal forces, while positive knowledge spillovers and...

We introduce knowledge spillovers as an externality in the production function of competitive firms operating in a finite spatial domain under adjustment costs. Spillovers are spatial as productive knowledge flows more easily among firms located nearby. When knowledge spillovers are not...

Nowadays, a process can be observed in Germany where electricity producing and trading firms react to the electricity market liberalisation by merging market shares, since the year 2000, which reduces the number of suppliers and influences production and consumer prices. This paper discusses...

In the last fifteen years, income differences among European Member States have been strongly narrowing while the process has been matched with a widening of the inter-regional variance within single countries. Traditionally, regional economic disparities in Europe have been ascribed to...

This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

A spatial welfare framework for the analysis of the spatial dimensions of sustainability is developed. It incorporates agglomeration effects, interregional trade, negative environmental externalities and various land use categories. The model is used to compare rankings of spatial configurations...

Aim of this paper is to explore the main drivers of outsourcing of knowledge intensive business services by Italian manufacturing firms. While anecdotal and empirical evidence has emphasized labour cost and scale economies as behind firms’ choices to outsource production or service activities,...

We characterize how the size distribution of plants, within narrowly defined industries, changed in Italy over a ten-year time span, and relate this to the stock of civic capital at the provincial level. Data on plant size come from the 1991 and 2001 Italian censuses. Civic capital turns out to...

This paper describes a methodology to develop a Computable General Equilibrium model with a sub-national detail starting from a global database and model presenting the country-level as the highest resolution. This procedure is demonstratively applied to Italy, but can be transferred to any...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the “cluster literature” contained in scientific journals from 1969 to 2007. Thanks to an original database we study the evolution of a stream of literature which focuses on a research object which is both a theoretical puzzle and an empirical...