Although human capital externalities are a key variable in theories of economic growth, there has been little investigation of the mechanism by which these externalities are realized. We examine the relationship between the local levels of human capital and firm formation rates and find that...

Motivated by differences in new-firm survival across regions, this paper explores the impact of regional human capital on new-firm survival rates. New-firm survival is interpreted through formation rates of surviving versus closed firms in the service sector. By incorporating knowledge...

Recent empirical evidence has shown that firm's innovation behavior exhibits high persistency but not much is known about potential contingencies affecting the degree of persistence. This paper focuses on the role of the local knowledge environment and asks how local knowledge spillovers affect...

Today more than half of the 7 billion inhabitants of the planet live in urban areas, with this share expected to keep rising. Whereas in developed countries urbanisation has been a long and slow process, in developing countries this process is now characterised by a really fast pace and a high...

Being a jack-of-all-trades increases the probability of running an entrepreneurial venture successfully; but what happens to jack-of-few-trades who lack sufficient skills? This paper investigates a possible compensation mechanism between balanced skills and cities, and how this compensatory...

Cities have become playing grounds for competitive behaviour and rapid economic dynamics. But in many cities (or urban agglomerations) economic growth is mainly manifested in specific geographic areas, where creative people and innovative entrepreneurs are located. This paper offers first the...

We consider an economy in which a heterogeneous population of agents have to choose among a common set of alternatives. The utilities associated to the different alternatives posses a common component and an individual component, which reflect differences in the underlying structure of agents...