"It is broadly accepted that two aspects regarding the modeling strategy are essential for the accuracy of forecast: a parsimonious model focusing on the important structures, and the quality of prospective information. Here, we establish a Global VAR framework, a technique that considers a...

"The paper analyses movements in the unemployment rate of West German districts in the period 1992-2004 by the chain reaction theory of unemployment (CRT). The estimations show that unemployment movements are generated together by lagged adjustment processes and by exogenous shocks. We find that...

"Almost twenty years after German reunification there are still huge income disparities between western and eastern regions in Germany. The main purpose of the paper is to show how social transfer payments reduce these inter-regional disparities. In a first step we examine inequalities in the...

"Theories in regional science predict that related establishments benefit from their mutual proximity due to forward-backward linkages, labor market pooling and knowledge spillovers (the Marshallian forces). While the existence of these externalities as a whole is well supported by the empirical...

"The advent of the New Economic Geography has spawned a renewed interest in questions of agglomeration. The work expands the research on the impact of agglomeration economies on employment growth by connecting two strands of the empirical literature. A localization index and a cluster index are...

"Economic integration typically goes along with disintegration of production through outsourcing and offshoring (Feenstra 1998). As horizontal and vertical links between firms become more and more pronounced, value chains within regions are increasingly organized by production and innovation...

"Der durchschnittliche Bruttojahreslohn pro Beschäftigtem in einer Region liefert wertvolle Informationen über die regionalen Verdienstmöglichkeiten. Bedingt durch das Meldeverfahren an die Sozialversicherungsträger werden die Einkommen jedoch nicht mit ihrer vollen Höhe erfasst, sondern...

"Die Wahl eines Standorts ist für Firmen von fundamentaler Bedeutung. Häufig werden Investitionen nötig, die eine Verlagerung mit hohen 'versunkenen Kosten' verbinden. Auch wenn die Anzahl der Verlagerungen seit den 1970er Jahren deutlich zugenommen hat, bleiben sie weiterhin relativ seltene...

"The paper shows that the distribution of regional unemployment rates in Germany exhibits strong persistent behaviour. Furthermore, panel unit root tests and autoregressive fixed effects models indicate that regional unemployment rates display conditional rather than unconditional convergence....

"This paper explores how different levels of regional concentration and specialisation affect the long-term growth of young firms. The sample consists of knowledge-intensive and non-knowledge-intensive western German manufacturing firms which were set-up in 1992 and managed to survive 11 years....