This paper reviews the empirical literature on growth and convergence that has addressed the importance of spatial factors. An important distinction in this literature is the one between absolute and relative location. The literature on absolute location predominantly uses non-spatial...

Policy makers spend large amounts of public resources on the foundation of science parks and other forms of geographically clustered business activities, in order to stimulate regional innovation. Underlying the relation between clusters and innovation is the assumption that co-located firms...

The business performance of firms in the creative high-tech sector shows much variation. This paper examines whether the geographical location of such business firms influences the performance of these firms. The overarching analysis framework of this paper emerges from the recently developed...

This paper investigates patterns of manufacturing location in the context of increased economic integration in Central and East European countries. Using regional data for the period 1990-1999, we identify and compare patterns and determinants of manufacturing location in five European Union...

This paper analyzes the impact of the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Nias earthquake in 2005 on population dynamic across regions in Aceh and North Sumatera. We find no evidence that the disasters affected the regularity of size-distribution of the regions. The estimates of a population...

Popular urban tourist destinations are attracting large numbers of both overnight visitors and excursionists. Since urban cities perform a multitude of functions, the space requirements of tourists can, at times, interfere with those of local users. This paper addresses the issue of disutilities...

This discussion paper led to an article in <I>Papers in Regional Science</I> (2014). Volume 93, Issue 2(SI).<P> The majority of cities in our world is not only connected through conventional physical infrastructure, but increasingly through modern digital infrastructure. This paper aims to test whether...</p></i>

We develop a model of an economy with several regions, which differ in scale. Within each region, workers have to search for a job-type that matches their skill. They face a trade-off between match quality and the cost of extended search. This trade-off differs between regions, because search is...

Why has job growth over the past decades been weaker in the Dutch Randstad area than in surrounding regions? In a simultaneous equations analysis, we find that employment adjusts to the regional supply of labour. Net internal migration is predominantly determined by regional housing supply and...

Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...