With innovation increasingly important to economic development, innovation policy is attracting attention from politicians and policy-makers at all levels. Regional policy-makers face a distinctive challenge in that innovation takes place in international networks reaching far beyond their...

Decentralised experimentation and mutual learning of public policies is seen as one of the important advantages of federal systems (Oates: laboratory federalism). Based upon Hayekian ideas of the advantages of decentralised experimentation (as a discovery procedure), we analyse the long-term...

A large and still growing body of literature suggests that entrepreneurship is of exceptional importance in explaining regional specific efficiencies of knowledge spillovers. Although quantifying the impact of entrepreneurial activity for economic growth is an interesting issue -- particularly...

Many US municipalities confront serious challenges due to aging water and wastewater infrastructure. Many systems require immediate repairs, upgrades, and replacement, but available funding is scarce. Readily available low-interest financing is of great help to such municipalities. The Water...

The paper analyses the impact of tax competition on innovation in the public sector. It is shown that the effects of increased mobility of the tax base on innovation and growth are ambiguous. The negative relationship is more likely, however. Moreover, it is shown that a Leviathan government may...

What causes a government to adopt a new program or policy? Despite a large number of empirical studies available to date, the relative importance of various determinants remains obscure because of difficulties of statistical identification. We present an experimental setting to study the...

The claim of a positive association between a firm’s social assets and its inno-vative capacity is a widely debated topic in the literature. Although controversial, such an argument has informed recent innovation policy across Germany, increasingly di-rected to cluster formation. In the light...

The claim of a positive association between a firm’s social assets and its inno-vative capacity is a widely debated topic in the literature. Although controversial, such an argument has informed recent innovation policy across Germany, increasingly di-rected to cluster formation. In the light...

The impact of environmental regulation on technology diffusion and innovations is studied using a unique data set of German residential buildings. We analyze how energy efficiency regulations, in terms of minimum standards, affects energy-use in newly constructed buildings and how it induces...