Social trust is increasingly seen as an important determinant of economic growth and social prosperity in regions and nations. Even in a comparatively homogeneous area such as Europe, there are stark sub-national differences in levels of generalized trust. It is thus of crucial importance to...

For a cross-section of 123 European regions, we find evidence for a positive effect of generalized trust on regional innovation activity. We aim to identify causal effects by using instrumental variables from climate and soil data, drawing from recent literature on the effects of climate on...

The set of available local ‘capabilities' determines what an economy produces today (its static comparative advantage) and, at the same time, defines the trajectories that the process of structural change may take in the future. The Product Space (PS) framework developed in recent seminal...