Policy makers spend large amounts of public resources on the foundation of science parks and other forms of geographically clustered business activities, in order to stimulate regional innovation. Underlying the relation between clusters and innovation is the assumption that co-located firms...

Knowledge drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in R&D, knowledge and learning processes, on the one hand, and productivity increases, on the other. However, the empirical evidence shows consistent...

An important subset of the literature on agglomeration externalities hypothesizes thatintrasectoral and intersectoral relations are endogenously determined in models of localand regional economic growth. Remarkably, structural adjustment models describing thespatio-temporal dynamics of...

Among Polish cities facing socio-economic difficulties are the former regional capitals which lost their administrative status due to the 1998 reform, reducing the number of regions from 49 to 16. Making use of this quasiexperimental setting, we assess the impact of the loss of administrative...

We study the role of land development restrictions for the effects of highway expansion on the spatial distribution of population. We demonstrate that these restrictions strongly interfered with the effects of highways in the Netherlands. Introducing an IV approach to address endogenous...

Policy makers spend large amounts of public resources on the foundation of science parks and other forms of geographically clustered business activities, in order to stimulate regional innovation. Underlying the relation between clusters and innovation is the assumption that co-located firms...

The recent dramatic change in energy supply in Japan has prompted a search for a new energy-environment-economic efficiency policy, in which a compromise has to be found between a sufficient supply of energy resources, the development of low carbon emission technology, and a continuation of...

This paper investigates how social interactions impact the decision to participate in one’s local environment. Existing work often reports correlations between social interactions and local participation, but it is unclear what the causal direction of this relationship is. A key contribution...

Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is a widely applied economic appraisal tool to support the planning and decision-making process for transport projects. However, in the planning literature CBA has been criticized for at least three reasons: 1) CBA focuses on traditional transport system related...

Structural funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the EuropeanUnion to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process ofconvergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Fundsby means of a panel data analysis for 13...