This paper attempts to model directly the "folk theorem" of spatial economics, according to which increasing returns to scale are essential for understanding the geographical distributions of activity. The model uses the simple structure of most New Economic Geography papers, with two identical...

Spatial proximity is assumed in the literature to be a prerequisite and trigger for cooperation and, subsequently, innovation. This paper examines conceptually the role of proximity between actors for cooperation activities. Using theories and findings from social psychology and combining them...

This paper studies the causal relations between regional employment growth in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) and overall regional employment growth using German labour-market data for the period 1999-2012. Adopting a recently developed technique, we are able to estimate a...

This paper develops a new conceptualization of the relationship between regional determinants and roles of foreign subsidiaries and empirically investigates this relationship in the UK at a disaggregated regional level. It focuses particularly on a relatively under- investigated field, that of...

In this paper we estimate agglomeration economies in Spain in 2009 basing on Ciccone?s (2002) model, which explains average labor productivity in one spatial unit on employment density and other controls. The novelty of our analysis is that the empirical model is estimated at a highly...

Criticisms vis-à-vis cluster policy are numerous, often confusing and really unhelpful; while some authors systematically question the merits, others on the contrary play a genuine role of counsel in his favour. This paper attempts to refocus the debate and analyses the economic issues, impacts...

The paper emphasizes the role of social capital in some particular rural clusters like the French "Poles d'Excellence Rurale" (PER) and the U.S. Rural Knowledge Clusters (RKC). The recent revival of the literature on social capital considers this resource as highly valuable when considering the...

The effects of inequality on economic growth depend on several factors. On one hand, they depend on the time horizon considered, on the initial level of income and on its initial distribution. But, on the other hand, as growth and inequality are also uneven across space, it also seems relevant...

When some industries are overrepresented in urban areas (urban concentration), some other industries must be overrepresented in rural areas (rural concentration). Existing measures of concentration do not distinguish between these different types of concentration. Instead, they rank industries...

Industries have varying abilities to benefit from externalities associated with geographical concentration, and are also likely to suffer in different degrees from crowding costs. This makes industries differ in their concentration process. We hypothesize that firms with low education levels...