The literature on the wage curve provides considerable evidence in favor of a negative relationship between unemployment and wages. It is thus often seen as a refutation of the Harris-Todaro model, who point to a positive relationship. This paper shows that both strands of literature are special...

During the last year, the research field of spatial economic has rapidly increased. There is consensus that the economic performance of a region depends not only on its own potential, but also on the development of their neighbouring regions. Knowledge spillovers, which are non constant over...

This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main...

Japan's markets for money, capital and foreign exchange are among the biggest worldwide. For many years, Tokyo's role as the leading financial center in Asia has been unchallenged. However, recently, other places in the region such as Singapore and Hong Kong have invested heavily to strengthen...

Modern (endogenous) growth theory tells us that knowledge spillovers are crucial for the growth of high-income economies. Against this background the paper provides a survey of theoretical and empirical findings highlighting the question of how geographically limited knowledge diffusion can help...

This paper focuses on tax competition and international migration in R&D sectors as agglomeration forces and trade restrictions are present. Economic integration forces industrialized countries to adapt their tax rates in order to keep their industrial status quo. Unlike the often discussed...

In the last ten years the space issue, i.e. the study of the role played by space in economic phenomena, has attracted a lot of interest from many economic fields. The combination of increasing returns, market imperfections, and trade costs creates forces that, together with factor endowments,...

This study analyses relative sectoral investment patterns in EU regions. In an exploratory spatial data analysis, spatial clusters of high relative investments can be identified for some sectors. In the econometric analysis, we control for heteroscedasticity and potential endogeneity and find...

The paper quantifies the impact of agglomeration economies on the clustering of German firms. Therefore, I use the 2006 Innobarometer survey, which focuses on cluster characteristics and activities of German firms, to empirically identify agglomeration economies derived from the New Economic...

This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...