Area 5 focuses on the regional and local dimensions of the new European path to socio-ecological transition. Its central assumption is that any strategy developed to enhance a socio-ecological transition is unlikely to yield strong results unless the resources of regional and local actors are...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

Dominance of theory-based education is not well connected by the current practices. So, the knowledge delivered within higher education institutions cannot create adequate value in the market and in turn which causes the youth unemployment to become a chronicle problem. Therefore, work placement...

A balanced current account in the euro area has disguised sizeable net lending imbalances at the country level, exposing the common currency area to severe pressures during the financial crisis. The key contribution of this paper is to evaluate the adjustment process through the lenses of the...

Most of the data available to economists is observational rather than the outcome of natural or quasi experiments. This complicates analysis because it is common for observationally distinct individuals to exhibit similar responses to a given environment and for observationally identical...

We provide a concise introduction to a household-panel data infrastructure that provides the international research community with longitudinal data of private households in Germany since 1984: the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We demonstrate the comparative strength of the SOEP data in...

Im Zuge der Osterweiterung der Europäischen Union eröffnen sich für die Beitrittskandidatenländer gute Möglichkeiten, wirtschaftliche Aktivitäten aus Westeuropa und anderswo zu attrahieren und im Pro-Kopf-Einkommen aufzuholen. Der Aufholprozess der Beitrittsländer wird jedoch von...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of various proximity dimensions on the innovative capacity of 276 regions in Europe within a knowledge production function model, where R&D and human capital are included as the main internal inputs. We combine the standard geographical...

Do regional identities determine different levels of FDI-induced growth? This paper analyses the impact of FDI on the growth rates of European regions. In so doing, it discusses the role of different components of territorial capital in magnifying or daunting such an impact. The paper starts...

In the domain of desertification and climate change an important amount of new knowledge and research material has been obtained from the many projects carried out in the EU-DG12 Environment and Climate programme. However, so far little effort has gone into making this scientific material...