Increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition. As a result, conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports become less informative and new measures are needed. In this paper we propose an ex-post accounting framework...

Every once in a while, national governments face difficult decision problems regarding financial support of important domestic firms or even entire national national industries. Similar problems are often faced by regional or urban governments. Given these problems, it is important to get...

Shift-Share analysis is a well-known methodology frequently used to obtain insights into the determinants of regional growth processes. It can address many issues, such as output growth, employment growth and productivity growth. After the initial equation proposed by Dunn (1960), several...

We investigate how variety affects the innovation output of a region. Borrowing arguments from theories of recombinant innovation, we expect that related variety will enhance innovation as related technologies are more easily recombined into a new technology. However, we also expect that...

R&D activities by one industry often have positive effects on the productivity performance of other industries, as a consequence of technology spillovers. Econometric problems (such as multicollinearity), however, have prevented researchers from identifying the industries that have been...

Politicians differ in their ability to implement some policy. In an election, candidates make commitments regarding the plans they will try to implement if elected. These serve as a signal of true ability. In equilibrium, candidates make overambitious promises. The candidate with the highest...

This paper introduces the EUREGIO database: the first time-series (annual, 2000-2010) of global IO tables with regional detail for the entire large trading bloc of the European Union. The construction of this database, which allows for regional analysis at the level of so-called NUTS2 regions,...

We examine the diffusion of steam technology across British counties during the eighteenth century. First, we provide new estimates for the regional variations in the timing, pace and extent of usage of steam engines. Our main data source is an updated version of the list of steam engines...