This paper examines the relationship between the level of public infrastructure and the level of productivity using panel data for the Spanish provinces over the period 1984-2004, a period which is particularly relevant due to the substantial changes occurring in the Spanish economy at that...

Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature. Existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on its impact on local innovative performance: some empirical analyses emphasize a positive effect, others speak about a 'dark side' of social capital. This paper aims...

We argue that identification problems bedevil most applied spatial research. Spatial econometrics solves these problems by deriving estimators assuming that functional forms are known and by using model comparison techniques to let the data choose between competing specifications. We argue that...

We provide empirical evidence on the role of labour market pooling in determining thespatial concentration of UK manufacturing establishments. This role arises because largeconcentrations of employment iron out idiosyncratic shocks and improve establishments'ability to adapt their employment to...

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more productive via various agglomeration economies. This paper provides a...

This paper is concerned with the influence of agglomeration economies on economicoutcomes across British regions. The concentration of economic activity in one place canfoster economic performance due to the reduction in transportation costs, the readyavailability of customers and suppliers, and...

The paper incorporates house prices within an NEG framework leading to the spatialdistributions of wages, prices and income. The model assumes that all expenditure goes tofirms under a monopolistic competition market structure, that labour efficiency units areappropriate, and that spatial...

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average...

The paper decomposes a geographical concentration index to examine the temporal scope of a spillover, which is the period of time over which one firm's activity directly affects the location of other firms' activities. Natural advantages are fixed over reasonably long time periods, but if...

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE) theory, in which wages relate to employment density. The paper makes an...