This paper analyses the hypothesis that the robust relationship between trust - as measured by the World Values Survey's question 'In general, do you think that most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?' - and economic growth, established by empirical...

This paper reviews approaches used for evaluating the performance of local or regional innovation systems. This evaluation is performed by a benchmarking approach in which a frontier production function can be determined, based on a knowledge production function relating innovation inputs and...

Do firm entry and exit improve the competitiveness of regions? If so, is this a universal mechanism or is it contingent on the type of industry or region in which creative destruction takes place? This paper analyses the effect of firm entry and exit on the competitiveness of regions, measured...

We investigate the impact of actors' positions within regional innovator networks on their innovative performance. The networks of four selected regions are based on information on patent applicants and inventors. Count data regressions show positive effects on innovation of both the total...

The aim of this paper is to test how geographical and technological proximity relate to a particular industry's innovative output. Two mechanisms are therefore tested, i.e. agglomeration economies and the regional exploitation of technological proximity. A new dataset is applied, which includes...