New enabling technologies are shaping the transformation of production activities. This process of change is characterised by growing digitization, inter-connectivity and automation. The diffusion of new technologies is, however, very uneven, and firms display different adoption behaviours. By...

This paper studies the causal relations between regional employment growth in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and overall regional employment growth using German labour-market data for the period 1999-2012. Adopting a recently developed technique, we are able to estimate a...

We compare the industrial dynamics in the core, semi-periphery and periphery in The Netherlands in terms of firm entry-exit, size, growth and sectoral location patterns. The contribution of our work is to provide the first comprehensive study on spatial differentiation in industrial dynamics for...

This empirical paper analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological diversification trend among the world’s largest manufacturing firms during the 1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: firstly, to emphasise the emerging...

In this paper we study a class of evolutionary models of industrial agglomeration with local positive feedbacks, which allow for a wide set of empirically-testable implications. Their roots rest in the Generalized Polya Urn framework. Here, however, we build on a birth-death process over a...

Are the observed spatial distributions of firms decided mostly by market-mediated, economy-wide locational forces, or rather by non-pecuniary, sector-specific ones? This work finds that the latter kind of forces weight systematically more than the former in deciding firm location. The analysis...

This paper adopts sociometric analysis to explore the process of knowledge acquisition and diffusion in clusters of firms. By comparing the knowledge systems of two clusters selected for being at different stages of their development path, this study shows that the knowledge system of the...

Economies of agglomeration are central in understanding the emergence of industrial clustering. However, existing models that incorporate economies of agglomeration to explain industrial concentration have been providing a quite small set of empirically testable predictions. In this paper, we...

By 2050 about 70% of the world's population is expected to live in cities. Cities offer spatial economic advantages that boost agglomeration forces and innovation, fostering further concentration of economic activities. For historic reasons urban clustering occurs along coasts and rivers, which...

Cities are key places of economic activity, as they produce an enormous amount of wealth compared to the land they cover. Their study is, therefore, of primary importance in understanding the success of nations. Given the many interactions among people that happen within them, cities are well...