Policy makers spend large amounts of public resources on the foundation of science parks and other forms of geographically clustered business activities, in order to stimulate regional innovation. Underlying the relation between clusters and innovation is the assumption that co-located firms...

This working paper offers a synthesis of the current knowledge on the determinants of productivity. It carefully reviews both “spatial” (e.g. agglomerations, infrastructure, geography) and “aspatial” (e.g. human capital, labour regulations, industry-level innovation and dynamism)...

Gegenstand zahlreicher regionalökonomischer Untersuchungen ist die Spezialisierung von Regionen auf eine oder wenige Branchen und die gemeinsame Standortwahl von Unterneh-men, also regionale Konzentration. Bevor jedoch die Gründe für die Verteilung ökonomischer Aktivität im Raum erforscht...

Innovation and entrepreneurship are key factors in current regional development initiatives, derived from the concepts of new economic growth theory. The aim of this paper is to combine an assessment of innovative and entrepreneurial performance with the spatial distribution and functional...

Due to the structural low-growth around the globe and the advent of the 4th Industrial Revolution, industrial and regional policy see a paradigm shift. Industrial policies shift from ‘picking or backing winners’ to ‘matching winners’. ‘Matching winners’ industrial policy aims to...

This paper examines regional effects of the InnoRegio program, which was conducted by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The InnoRegio program has been a new tool of innovation policy with the aim to improve innovativeness in East Germany on the basis of prosperous regional...

This paper estimates agglomeration benefits across five OECD countries, and represents the first empirical analysis that combines evidence on agglomeration benefits and the productivity impact of metropolitan governance structures, while taking into account the potential sorting of individuals...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern. Some models imply a catastrophic agglomeration process with hysteresis, so that concentration in one region is not...

This paper exploits a short-lived cooperation program between the U.S.S.R. and China, which led to the construction of 156 "Million-Rouble plants" in the 1950s. We isolate exogenous variation in location decisions due to the relative position of allied and enemy airbases and study the long-run...

Cluster policy is recognized as one of the pivotal elements of state-of-art innovation policy. State support for clusters helps to take into account regional peculiarities and engage the most innovative local actors into the process of innovation policy drafting and implementation. Cluster...