A key factor for a stable and solid development is the gain in labor productivity. The regions that manage to pull out of poverty and improve the living standards of their inhabitants, in fact, need to be able to diversify away from agriculture and other traditional sectors. In doing this, the...

Innovation performance seems to rely on efficiently integrating and extending different pieces of various types of knowledge emerging from diverse external sources. Different research traditions have stressed both formal (FSK) and informal sources of knowledge (ISK) as innovation performance...

The relationship between decentralization and the quality of governments is one of the core issues of decentralization studies. This paper aims to make two contributions to this research. Firstly, we conduct an empirical analysis at the local level, covering 174 regions across the European...

Over the past 30 years universities have been increasingly considered as key instruments of regional economic development policy in many countries of the World. Contrary to the US where studying the entire universe of academic institutions is a real possibility thanks to the availability of...

This paper estimates the impact of interregional knowledge flows on the productivity of research at the regional level. We develop the novel index of ’ego network quality’ in order to measure the value of knowledge that can be accessed from a particular region’s global knowledge network....

This study suggests a two-step approach to identifying and interpreting regional convergence clubs in Europe. The first step involves identifying the number and composition of clubs using a space-time panel data model for annual income growth rates in conjunction with Bayesian model comparison...

This paper presents a theoretical growth model that extends the Mankiw-Romer-Weil [MRW] model by accounting for technological interdependence among regional economies. Interdependence is assumed to work through spatial externalities caused by disembodied knowledge diffusion. The transition from...

The speed of income convergence in Europe remains one of the hot topics in regional economics. Recently Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) applied to spatial autoregressive models seems to have gained more popularity. BMA averages over some predetermined number of so called top models, ranked by the...