A series of recent papers have introduced some explorative methods based on Ripley’s K-function (Ripley in J R Stat Soc B 39(2):172–212, <CitationRef CitationID="CR43">1977</CitationRef>) analyzing the micro-geographical patterns of firms. Often the spatial heterogeneity of an area is handled by referring to a case–control design, in...</citationref>

The presence of knowledge spillovers and shared human capital is at the heart of the Marhall-Arrow- Romer externalities hypothesis. Most of the earlier empirical contributions on knowledge externalities, however, considered data aggregated at a regional level so that conclusions are based on the...

The use of the K-functions (Ripley, 1977) has recently become popular in the analysis of the spatial pattern of firms. It was first introduced in the economic literature by Arbia and Espa (1996) and then popularized by Marcon and Puech (2003), Quah and Simpson (2003), Duranton and Overman...

The study of the geographical distribution of firms and of the dynamic pattern of firm entry and firm exits is a particularly relevant issue in regional health economics especially in the view of policy intervention to geographically balance health service supply and demand. The current state of...

The main purpose of this Handbook is to provide overviews and assessments of the state-of-the-art regarding research methods, approaches and applications central to economic geography. The chapters are written by distinguished researchers from a variety of scholarly traditions and with a...

The potential offered by the increasing availability of micro-geographic data is tremendous and still largely not exploited. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to study the spatial dynamics of firm demography making use of such rich source of information. Exploiting the techniques of...

The spatial concentration of firms has long been a central issue in economics under both the theoretical and the applied point of view mainly due to the important policy implications. A popular approach to its measurement, which does not suffer from the problem of the arbitrariness of the...

La concentrazione spaziale delle attività economiche, a causa delle implicazioni che può avere per la crescita economica locale e le disparità territoriali, è un fenomeno di grande interesse per l’economia e le scienze regionali. È stato tuttavia riconosciuto che un ostacolo rilevante...

The paper proposes a novel methodology to assess the role of “location” in shaping firm growth. Along with traditional determinants (e.g., age, size and financial constraints), geographical location is alleged to drive firm growth. The...