While previous studies highlight the importance of the manufacturing sector in the economy, we argue that rather backbone services play a key role for economic growth. We perform an Input-Output analysis to determine the linkages between backbone services and manufacturing in South Africa. We...

The regional or national innovation performance has been repeatedly measured in the literature; but it has so far not been discussed what this means, especially in relation to a region. What is the contribution of a region to innovation output? The usual approaches implicitly assume that higher...

In the literature on Sen’s capability approach, studies focussing on the empirical measurement of conversion factors are comparatively rare. We add to this field by adopting a measure of "conversion efficiency" that captures the efficiency with which individuals convert their resources...

This paper focuses on how consumer motivation can be tapped in order to encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies. Consumers are heterogeneous they may be guided by intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation. While information provision policies (such as the energy label for cars) may be...

In this paper, we use stochastic dynamic programming to model the choice of a municipality which has to design an optimal waste management program under uncertainty about the price of recyclables in the secondary market. The municipality can, by undertaking an irreversible investment, adopt a...

This paper examines whether monetary incentives are an effective tool for increasing domestic waste sorting. We exploit the exogenous variation in the waste management policies experienced during the years 1999-2008 by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). We estimate with a...

Empirical analyses show that the employment effects of start-ups are highest in agglomerations, whereas moderately congested areas exhibit only modest effects, and weak or even no significant effects could be found in rural regions. This paper will set out to show that these discrepancies arise...

Recent empirical research has found that the effect of new business formation on employment emerges over a period of about ten years and has identified a 'wave' pattern of these effects. In this study, we decompose the overall contribution of new business formation on employment change into...

We investigate the role played by different fields of academic knowledge and various types of higher education institutions in the emergence of innovative start-ups in a region. We show that education and research in the applied and natural sciences have the strongest effect on the emergence of...

Based on detailed information about the regional knowledge base, particularly about universities, we find that regional public research and education have a strong positive impact on new business formation in innovative industries but not in industries classified as non-innovative. Measures for...