Nowadays, a process can be observed in Germany where electricity producing and trading firms react to the electricity market liberalisation by merging market shares, since the year 2000, which reduces the number of suppliers and influences production and consumer prices. This paper discusses...

Recent studies suggest a considerable amount of horizontal strategic interaction amongst governments exists. The empirical approach in these studies typically relies on estimating reaction functions in a uni-dimensional policy framework, where a nonzero slope estimate suggests strategic...

We introduce knowledge spillovers as an externality in the production function of competitive firms operating in a finite spatial domain under adjustment costs. Spillovers are spatial as productive knowledge flows more easily among firms located nearby. When knowledge spillovers are not...

Within this paper an oligopolistic German electricity market is modelled by a game theoretic modelling tool representing a Nash equilibrium. Due to European electricity market liberalisation electricity producing and trading firms react strategically like global market players by joining and...

We explain the spatial concentration of economic activity, in a model of economic geography, when the cost of environmental policy - which is increasing in the concentration of emissions - and an immobile production factor act as centrifugal forces, while positive knowledge spillovers and...

We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

We investigate the existence of wage premium due to cultural diversity across US cities. Using census data from 1970 to 1990, we find that at the urban level richer diversity is systematically associated with higher average nominal wages for white US-born males. We measure cultural diversity in...

The question of the spatial impacts of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has animated intellectual and policy debate for a long time. At the beginning of the 1990s the advent of the Internet brought a new surge of debate: it was argued that the Internet would free the economy from...

In an empirical analysis, considering 236 U.S. cities in the period 1980-1990, we document a strong positive correlation between local supply of skills and their return. In SMSA's where the average education of workers is high the education premium is also high. This is true both considering the...

In recent years, interest in tourism has spread rapidly throughout many small and medium European cities, which previously have not necessarily considered themselves as tourist destinations. Tourism is increasingly seen as a potential lever towards high economic growth, measured both in terms of...