Even though most countries have agreed to a harmonization of intellectual property rights by signing the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), there is still much dispute about the optimal level of protection of intellectual property rights in the world....

Nowadays it is quite evident that knowledge-based society necessarily involves the revaluation of human and intangible assets, as the advancement of local economies significantly depend on the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of human capital[Lundvall, 2004]. As we can...

Nowadays several successful examples prove that universities have a quite intense role in the improvement of competitiveness of certain territories and in many cases they have an active role in endeavors regarding economic development. Modern economic development demands that due to the...

Nowadays it is more and more important to know that how certain units of regional economy (enterprises, higher education institutions, other units) affect local economy. The economic impact analysis of higher education institutions is more complex than the impact analysis of enterprises, since...

In this paper we study the situation of scholarly communication in Economics and Business Studies in Germany. We combine findings from an online survey, focus group interviews and a panel discussion. Some of the results of the survey are that economists at German universities and research...

We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high-school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting exogenous variation in cohort composition. We nd that a student's ordinal rank in...

This study investigates how exposure to an academic field influences students major choices. In particular, we analyze whether students who are inclined to study business change their intentions after being exposed to economics or law. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university. All...

The challenges posed by globalization have led to a rapid increase in the demand for higher education and, at the same time, many countries are earmarking more resources and efforts to foster their population's skills level and knowledge. Nowadays higher education is playing a crucial role in...

Knowledge flows from universities to the regional economy can take different forms ranging from formal research collaborations to consultancy and informal personal connections. One of the knowledge communication channels drawing substantial interest of both researchers and regional policy makers...

There have been numerous studies of the "impact" of HEIs on their host regions. These have typically focused on the demand for goods and services in the host region. The best of these studies employ regional input-output analyses. However, there has developed a "policy scepticism" about the...