Knowledge drives the growth of nations and regions in a competitive space-economy. Hence, we would expect a strong correlation between investments in R&D, knowledge and learning processes, on the one hand, and productivity increases, on the other. However, the empirical evidence shows consistent...

Amid global climate change concerns, policymakers worldwide are increasingly scrutinizing environmentally harmful subsidies. This study examines the tax-deductibility of job-related commuting expenses, which has faced criticism for promoting longer commutes and congestion. Through a controlled,...

Taxes create incentives; yet, the potency of these incentives may depend on the salience and households’ perceptions of the tax itself. We investigate this issue in the context of property taxes, exploring how accurately households perceive their property tax liabilities and what factors...

We consider the role of local geographic peers in determining equilibrium firm behavior. We exploit in-transitivity in local peer-firm networks and utilize spatial econometric techniques to circumvent well-known challenges in estimating and interpreting empirical models of peer effects. We find...

The Spatial Interaction Model proposed by Alonso as “Theory of Movements” offers an innovative specification of spatial origin-destination flow models. Equations for flows between regions, total outflow from and total inflow to a region are linked by balancing factors. This paper presents a...

Human resources are a key factor for firm success, particularly nowadays when most industrial economies face an increasing shortage of qualified labour. With their pooled labour markets, regional clusters have been shown to be a preferable location for firms in order to satisfy their demand for...

Social interactions are considered pivotal to agglomeration economies. We explore a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how distance and population density shape the structure of social interactions. Exploiting an exogenous change in travel times, we show that distance is highly...

We show for Germany that labor productivity as reflected in wage is, ceteris paribus, higher for workers who previously acquired work experience in rather urban labor markets with a large local workforce than in rather rural labor markets which are small in terms of regional employment. Our...

We show for Germany that labor productivity as reflected in wage is, ceteris paribus, higher for workers who previously acquired work experience in rather urban labor markets with a large local workforce than in rather rural labor markets which are small in terms of regional employment. Our...