In this paper, we develop a theoretical model that provides an additional explanation for the forest transition based on a trade liberalisation scenario. Furthermore, in contrast with most explanations, in which the forest transition can only take place at a local level at the expense of other...

This paper studies the effect of the Spanish Reconquest, a military campaign that aimed to expel the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, on the population of its most important cities. The almost four centuries of Reconquest offer a “quasi-natural” experiment to study the persistence of...

This paper examines how technology specialization, measured by citations-weighted patents, affects trade flows. The paper analyzes (i) the relationship between technology specialization and export specialization across regions and (ii) how the technology specialization of origin and destination...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between human capital endowments and the structure of regional export flows. Since the development of each export product may be assumed to be associated with innovation activity, requiring human capital inputs, the core hypothesis...

Do agglomerations stimulate productivity? An extensive literature on agglomeration economies, or urban increasing returns, has analyzed this question with aggregated spatial data. This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and productivity at the firm level using static and...

The relationship between start-up rates and regional economic development has been studied rather extensively in recent years. Dynamics in start-up rates have however received considerably less attention. In this paper we analyze the persistence of start-up rates across Swedish regions over a...

This paper focuses on how characteristics of regions pertaining to local information about product varieties and markets as well as networks for the transmission of information about innovation opportunities influence the arrival of innovation ideas to existing and potential entrepreneurs. We...

Fixed entry costs play an important role to explain the heterogeneity among exporters in terms of the geographical scope of their export activities. Yet, the existing literature has paid little attention to the nature and variation of such costs across different markets. This paper proposes a...

This paper introduces a model where new products are introduced by entrepreneurs or innovating firms in a quasi-temporal setting. Market conditions are characterized by monopolistic competition between varieties belonging to the same product group, where varieties can become obsolete over time...