The last decades saw a pronounced shift in innovation policy in Germany and many other countries towards increased funding of cooperative R&D. Over the last years, competitions between regional initiatives pushed this trend even further by adding a regional perspective, by increasing the scope...

The growth rate of temporary help service employment is often considered to be a leading business cycle indicator, because the firing and hiring of temporary help workers typically lead that of permanent workers. However, few works in the literature focus on the mechanism that generates the lag...

In a simple growth model we explore the current and future growth effects of the regional population structure. Regional GDP growth in 227 regions within six countries in central Europe is explored as how they depend on the young and old dependency ratio. The young dependency ratio (YDR) is...

We introduce a regression-based gravity model for commodity flows between 35 regions in Austria. We incorporate information regarding the highway network into the spatial connectivity structure of the spatial autoregressive econometric model. We find that our approach produces improved model fit...

In this paper we describe the EAR (regional economic accessibility) model to investigate the impact of the improvement of railroad infrastructure on regional GDP, population and firms growth in 99 Austrian regions. We evaluate the impact of four potential railroad infrastructure investment...

Regional unemployment rates in the European Union (EU-15) reveal a core-periphery structure. Large ?core? regions in the middle of the continent have low unemployment rates, whereas excessive mass unemployment is predominantly found in the peripheral regions at the outside borders of EU-15. This...

The paper explores regional trade integration of the countries involved in the EU eastward enlargement (EU-25) processes distinguishing the possible regional trade clusters within EU-25 that may support integration of the EU-15 and the new member states. We examine whether the gravity equation...

One of the most prominent instruments of regional policy is to foster education and human capital formation in economically lagging regions. However, regional policy of this type can actually hurt instead of help the poor areas. The reason is that individual geographical mobility increases with...

This paper investigates the functioning of regional labour markets in Italy and Germany for different employee groups. In the light of high and persistent differences in unemployment and wage rates between the North and South of Italy and the West and East of Germany, we first derive theoretical...

The paper aims at testing Florida's concept of the Creative Class using panel data for 323 West German regions for the time period 1975 - 2004. Applying a dynamic system approach based on GMM, we find that the local concentration of the Creative Class has predictive power for the economic...