This paper examines the empirical relationship between agglomeration and economic growth for a panel of 48 Central and Eastern European regions from 1995 to 2006. By agglomeration, we mean the within-regional concentration of aggregate economic activity, which we measure using the 'topographic'...

The findings of recent studies on adjustment processes suggest that regional labour markets in the EU and the US differ significantly. Low wage flexibility and limited labour mobility in European countries involve persistent unemployment differentials across regions. However, the spatial...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on growth and convergence that has addressed the importance of spatial factors. An important distinction in this literature is the one between absolute and relative location. The literature on absolute location predominantly uses non-spatial...

Using sigma and beta convergence methods, this study tests economic convergence in Turkish NUTS-2 regions between 2004-2011. The findings of sigma convergence analysis show that the interregional income gap decreases during economic recession periods and increases during economic expansion...

This paper analyses regional growth in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 1990s, when regional disparities sharply increased. We aim to identify the factors behind growth and investigate in particular the role of (foreign) investment, education and innovation as well as geographical...

Based on a standard idea-based model of endogenous growth we test the hypothesis that regional innovative activity is path-dependent, and investigate the geographical scope of knowledge spillovers. Using data for West-German regions, two alternative indicators of the stock of knowledge are...

A wide urban-rural disparity is observed in employment growth in the United States. For example, employment growth averaged 2.1 percent in urban counties during 1998-2007, compared with just 1 percent in rural counties. In this study, we examine the sources of U.S. employment growth using the...

The present research provides evidence on the determinants driving the differences in the unemployment-output relationship in Spanish regions. We followed a two-step approach. First, we estimated a set of time-varying Okun’s coefficients (rolling-window) for the autonomous communities in Spain...

In this study, we use Okun’s Law to examine whether growth has been jobless in seventeen MENA countries. The methods used are the ARDL approach for the individual country and the panel data analysis for the entire sample. The period considered in this study is from 1980 to 2013. To test for...

Despite its stability over time, as for any statistical relationship, Okun's law is subject to deviations that can be large at times. In this paper, we provide a mapping between residuals in Okun's regressions and structural shocks identified with a SVAR model by inspecting how unemployment...