We develop a comprehensive wealth index for cities that measures their endowment with environmental, energy, social, human, and economic capital stocks. We apply this index to the 100 largest autonomous cities in Germany. We find that (i) a good economic performance does not need to come at the...

This paper considers the link between the local availability of services and a firm's decision to become a multinational. This is a highly topical issue, given that many industrialised countries are increasingly becoming services economies and firms become increasingly more globalised. In an...

Night lights could be a valuable proxy of economic activity at the subnational level when GDP data are lacking or of poor quality. Supplementing Henderson et al.'s (2012) analysis at the national level, we assess the stability of the elasticity of GDP with regard to night lights across regions...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

The BioRegio contest and the BioProfile contest initiated by the German Federal Government have drawn much international attention as prototypes of a new kind of technology policy aiming at the exploitation of regional innovation and growth potential through clustering. There is, however, little...

Endogeneous growth theory views externalities and particularly externalities associated with knowledge spillovers as the engine of economic growth. In some influential papers (e.g. Glaeser et al. 1992) it is argued that these knowledge spillovers do not transmit costlessly over space. Rather,...

The present paper aims at explaining the regional deconcentration of economic activities in (West) Germany during the past two decades. Using an idea-based endogenous growth model that encloses several innovative sectors, that subjects economic activity to externalities of agglomeration, and...

Based on a standard idea-based model of endogenous growth we test the hypothesis that regional innovative activity is path-dependent, and investigate the geographical scope of knowledge spillovers. Using data for West-German regions, two alternative indicators of the stock of knowledge are...

Although it is well known that Markov process theory, frequently applied in the literature on income convergence, imposes some very restrictive assumptions upon the data generating process, these assumptions have generally been taken for granted so far. The present paper proposes, resp. recalls...

Foreign-owned firms are frequently viewed as an important source of new capital, access to world markets and employment generation and there exist numerous studies on the determinants of FDI flows and the role of incentives designed to attract FDI. Similarly important for economic growth are...