This book explores the relationship between families, firms, and regions and the extent to which these relationships contribute to regional economic and social development. Although family business participation in economic activities has been a common phenomenon since pre-industrial societies,...

This paper analyses the wage demands of a sector-level monopoly union facing internationally mobile firms. A simple two-country economic geography model is used to describe how firms relocate in function of international di erences in production costs and market size. The union sets wages in...

The home market effect (HME) is commonly defined as a more than proportional supply response to a demand shock. Recent theoretical literature, however, shows that predictions from the traditional twocountry framework do not always survive in multi-country settings. This is because 'third'...

Urbanization economies - the effects on productivity and utility created endogenously by larger cities - are a fundamental component of both the economic geography of modern societies and the perpetuation of innovation and economic growth at a national level. Cities account for vast majorities...

Only a few research papers have analysed the spatial distribution of economic activity in Ireland. There are a number of reasons for this, not least the fact that comprehensive data on the location of economic activity by sector across all sectors has not been available at the highly...

Increasing-returns-to-scale imperfect competition trade models predict a more than proportionate relationship between the larger country's share in world endowments and its share in producing firms: the so called home market effect (HME). While this result plays a key role in empirical testing,...

One of the most significant changes in the global economy today is the strong increase in outgoing foreign direct investment (OFDI) from emerging economies to industrialised countries. Whereas investment in less developed countries is often motivated by the sourcing of natural resources and...

We analyse the general equilibrium effects of an asymmetric decrease in transport costs, combining a large scale spatial dynamic general equilibrium model for 267 European NUTS 2 regions with a detailed transport model at the level of individual road segments. As a case study we consider the...

Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first one, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution...