This paper looks at the link between inter-regional mobility, innovation and firms' behavioural heterogeneity in their reliance on localised external sources of knowledge. By linking patent data (capturing inventors' inter-regional mobility) with firm-level data (providing information on firms'...

Given the migration premium previously identified in an impact evaluation approach, this paper asks the question of why migration is not more prominent, given such high premium associated with it. Using long-term household panel data drawn from rural Tanzania, Kagera for the period 1991-2004,...

This paper attempts to describe part of the history of Chinese rural migration to urban industrial areas. Using a case study of a township in Sichuan, the author examines a type of rural development which she defines as a "bottom-up" style strategy of regional development. Different types of...

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by Fielding (1989). It argues that occupational progression in such places particularly depends on concentrations both of...

Ethnic inventors play important roles in US innovation systems, especially in high-tech regions like Silicon Valley. Do 'ethnicity-innovation' channels exist elsewhere? This paper investigates, using a new panel of UK patents microdata. In theory, ethnicity might affect positively innovation via...

Employment flexibility is commonly associated to greater labour mobility and thus faster cross-regional adjustments. The literature however offers very little hard evidence on this and quite limited theoretical guidance. This paper examines empirically the relationship between employment...

To examine the impact of migrants on the average firm productivity, wages and welfare we construct a general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003) considering heterogeneous firms with different productivity levels and imperfect substitutability between migrants and...

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevator effect). It shows both effects to be substantively important, though less...

We hypothesize that as the distance of a residential move increases, the cost of collecting information on the destination housing market rises, the amount and quality of information collected fall, and the chances of making an ill-informed housing purchase decision increases, reducing the...

Growing cultural diversity is seen as important for innovation. Research has focused on two potential mechanisms: a firm effect, with diversity at the firm level improving knowledge sourcing or ideas generation, and a city effect, where diverse cities helping firms innovate. This paper uses a...