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...

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...

The relationship between the labor force participation and the business cycle has become a topic in the economic literature. However, few studies have considered whether the cyclical sensitivity of the labor force participation is influenced by "social effects". In this paper, we construct a...

Multinational firms transfer to their foreign affiliates superior technology, leading to higher productivity of their workers and therefore to higher wages, or so the often cited rent-sharing theory of multinational firms explains. But studies have shown that oftentimes, this results not from...

The great majority of the theoretical analysis about electoral cycles has considered the national space as the territory of interest for the study of the economic consequences of an electoralist behaviour by the central government. This fact, in conjunction to the nature of the data most...

The paper studies the impact of intangible assets on economic growth and unemployment from a regional perspective. The familiar relationship between changes in the unemployment rate and economic growth – known as Okun's law – is taken as a workhorse of the analysis and estimated for the 27...

In this paper we use spatial dependence panel data models to analyse regional growth behaviour in Italy. Controlling for fixed-effects allows us to disentangle the effect of spatial dependence (or spatial interaction) from that of spatial heterogeneity and of omitted variables and, thus, to...

In this paper, we investigate innovation factors and their role in regional economic performance for a sample of 261 EU NUTS 2 regions over the period 2009-2012. In our study, we identify regions with spillover as well as drain effects of innovation factors on economic performance. The spatial...

Okun's law is an extremely influential parameter in empirical research and policy analysis, based on the sizable number of estimates from this perspective. Nevertheless, it is also subject to considerable heterogeneity. We first show graphical and statistical evidence on the existence of a high...

Recent dynamic contracting models of downward real wage rigidity with "equal treatment" – newly hired workers cannot price themselves into jobs by undercutting incumbents – imply that real wages are relatively rigid in "bad" times but upwardly flexible during "good" times. We use an...