The findings of recent studies on adjustment processes suggest that regional labour markets in the EU and the US differ significantly. Low wage flexibility and limited labour mobility in European countries involve persistent unemployment differentials across regions. However, the spatial...

New Economic Geography (NEG) has reached a theoretical consolidation while related empirical tests are still scarce. The present paper aims at providing some evidence on the validity of forces emphasised by NEG. The analysis starts from the nominal wage equation derived from the Krugman...

As, in Europe, many institutional reforms have been undertaken to establish an economic union, it can be expected that the relevance of borders has decreased over time. For the EU 15, we investigate the expected integration process of the market for corporate control - an illustrative market for...

The present paper considers urban sprawl in Europe from a multi- dimensional and exploratory point of view. Several literatures on the topic (mainly from urban economics, but also from other fields such as urban planning or regional science) are reviewed to extract the main dimensions of the...

There is an ongoing debate on the concentration of container throughput in the European container port system. A particular feature is the dominant position of ports located in the Hamburg-Le Havre range. Some proponents of southern European ports argue that a shift in port traffic from the...

For a cross-section of 123 European regions, we find evidence for a positive effect of generalized trust on regional innovation activity. We aim to identify causal effects by using instrumental variables from climate and soil data, drawing from recent literature on the effects of climate on...

This paper analyses the determinants of spatial distribution of foreign technological activity across 96 German regions (1996-2009). We identify foreign inventive activity by applying the 'cross-border-ownership concept' to transnational patent applications. The descriptive analysis shows that...

We test a new model where the entrepreneurial decision is described as a process of successive engagement levels, i.e., as an entrepreneurial ladder. Five levels are distinguished using nearly 12,000 observations from the 2004 “Flash Eurobarometer survey on Entrepreneurship” covering the 25...

In the modern economy, cities are assumed to be in fierce competition over attracting foreign investments in leading sectors of the world economy. Despite the rich theoretical discourse on these 'wars', it remains unclear which territories are competing with each other over which types of...

The Black Death killed 40% of Europe’s population between 1347-1352, making it one of the largest shocks in the history of mankind. Despite its historical importance, little is known about its spatial effects and the effects of pandemics more generally. Using a novel dataset that provides...