This paper substantiates the debate following Richard Florida’s suggestion to measure regional human capital by creative occupations rather than education. Consistent with Florida’s notion of creativity, it suggests a microfoundation that relates creativity to workers’ cognitive and...

This paper solves one of the puzzles in the analysis of regional and industrial distributions of economic activity, the discrepancy between absolute and relative measures. It shows that the difference between an absolute and a relative Theil index of localization can be expressed in terms of...

This paper estimates annual data on educational attainment for 3,076 mainland U.S. counties 1991 -- 2005. Being estimated without resorting to ancillary information, this data is suited particular well for panel regression analyses. Several plausibility checks indicate that the data is fairly...

This paper establishes eight stylized facts on the evolution of the localization of economic activity across industries and regions in the EU-15 since 1980. Localization, which nests concentration and specialization, is measured by a Theil index. The stylized facts reveal a broad aggregate trend...

This paper presents descriptive evidence suggesting that there may be something to be learned about the future patterns of international offshoring from the recent patterns of “domestic offshoring”, the relocation of activities across regions within countries. Industries appear to offshore...

The paper extends the methodological toolbox of measures of industrial concentration and regional specialization. First, a taxonomy is proposed which gives rise to a modular construction system for disproportionality measures based on three characteristic features: the projection function, the...

Night lights could be a valuable proxy of economic activity at the subnational level when GDP data are lacking or of poor quality. Supplementing Henderson et al.’s (2012) analysis at the national level, we assess the stability of the elasticity of GDP with regard to night lights across regions...

Based on a standard idea-based model of endogenous growth we test the hypothesis that regional innovative activity is path-dependent, and investigate the geographical scope of knowledge spillovers. Using data for West-German regions, two alternative indicators of the stock of knowledge are...

The present paper aims at explaining the regional deconcentration of economic activities in (West) Germany during the past two decades. Using an idea-based endogenous growth model that encloses several innovative sectors, and in which economic activity is subject to externalities of...

Although it is well known that Markov process theory, frequently applied in the literature on income convergence, imposes some very restrictive assumptions upon the data generating process, these assumptions have generally been taken for granted so far. The present paper proposes, resp. recalls...