The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms? innovation...

This paper studies the convergence in the European Union on Purchasing Power Parity. Firstly, we develop a method for the estimation of PPP series and then, we put it into practice and estimate the monthly Purchasing Power Parity for the period January 1995 to July 2003. Secondly, convergence is...

In this paper we study a class of evolutionary models of industrial agglomeration with local positive feedbacks, which allow for a wide set of empirically-testable implications. Their roots rest in the Generalized Polya Urn framework. Here, however, we build on a birth-death process over a...

This work explores the spatial distribution of productive activities in the Italian manufacturing industry. We propose an econometric model which tries to disentangle locationspecific from sectoral drivers in the dynamic process of spatial agglomeration. The basic idea is that the former...

In an economic geography model where both a negative pecuniary and a positive technological externality are present, we introduce an explicit dynamics of firms locational choice and we characterize its long run distribution. Our analysis shows that economic activities evenly distribute when 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...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the accident reporting strategy of drivers, within a Bonus-Malus system. We exhibit the induced modification of the corresponding class level transition matrix and derive the optimal reporting strategy for rational drivers. The hunger for bonuses...

A significant problem in the collection of responses to potentially sensitive questions, such as relating to illegal, immoral or embarrassing activities, is non-sampling error due to refusal to respond or false responses. Eichhorn & Hayre (1983) suggested the use of scrambled responses to reduce...

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...