This research report from the Milken Institute ranks U.S. metropolitan areas that are recording the top economic performance and creating the most jobs in the nation. The index is an outcomes-based measure as opposed to one that incorporates explicit measures of business costs, cost-of-living...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkablywell in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simplerank-size rule known as Zipf´s law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is thechurning of industries...

This paper investigates some crucial aspects of the recent development of industrial districts in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where this type of spatial agglomeration of industrial firms has flourished since the period immediately after the Second World War. In particular, it is aimed at...

The paper Investigates stability and change of regional economic activities in the longrun.As the unit of analysis we selected the machine tool industry in West Germany forthe years 1953 to 2002. We spot a strong variance in the activities between the differentregions. These differences are...

In this paper we build a quality-augmented version of an economic geography model whereconsumers have heterogenous tastes for a set of manufacturing varieties. We discuss afootloose capital model and a footloose entrepreneur model. We show that firms selling thegoods with higher values select...

In this qualitative sociological and quantitative economic policy paper, we start out from the assumption of a very recent European Commission Background paper on the "Efficiency and effectiveness of social spending", which says the effectiveness of social spending can be defined by the degree...

Starting from Professor Kornai´s assertion about the necessity to focus on the long-termperspectives of the transformation process, we analyze in this paper the Lisbon performanceof the countries of the European Union from such a long-term, structural perspective. Wepresent in a simple form the...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents thatexporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. Thispositive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies aftercontrolling for observed...

Recent theories of economic growth have stressed the role of externalities in generating growth. Using data from the Census Bureau that tracks all employers in the whole U.S. private sector economy, we examine the impact of these externalities, as measured by entrepreneurial activity, on...

International trade, as a major factor of openness, has made an increasingly significantcontribution to economic growth. Chinese international trade has experienced rapidexpansion together with its dramatic economic growth which has made the country to targetthe world as its market. This...