According to the 'convergence hypothesis' multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998) as a...

Despite a growing number of empirical studies on efficiency spillovers arising from the presence of multinational firms for a number of countries, general conclusions on this issue have been inhibited by differences in the data sets and estimation techniques used across studies. In this paper we...

This paper analyses empirically the link between regional inequalities and economic development. Our starting hypothesis in this regard is that the evolution of regional inequalities should follow a bell-shaped curve depending on the level of national economic development since growth by its...

We study the pattern of concentration of industries in EU countries and regions between 1972 and 1995. We find that changes in concentration levels were mainly due to industry mobility rather than historical accidents and past levels of concentration as often argued by the New Economic Geography...

We examine the importance of a firm's own R&D activity and intra-sectoral spillovers on the decision to export and the export intensity using firm level panel data for Spain for the period 1990 to 1998. Our results are in line with preceding findings on the role played by firm-specific variables...

We extend the Bahk and Gort (1993) approach of testing for the impact of learning by doing (LBD) on firm productivity using data on a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms over the 1990-1998 period. While our results indicate evidence in support of the role of LBD, we show that this hinges on...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the relevance of supply- and demand-driven externalities in determining sectoral employment growth for 18 industrial sectors on a set of OECD countries. The paper improves over the existing literature in two ways. First, we use dynamic panel estimation...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on firm productivity using an establishment-level panel of Spanish manufacturing industry that spans the period 1990-1994. The key question concerns the elements that enable domestic firms to capture the positive...

The present paper provides evidence on the impact of economic integration on EU regions' business cycles convergence by focusing on the Spanish and Portuguese experiences. We use quarterly as well as annual series on employment growth to show that the EU integration process has had a positive...