We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service: health, educational...

The paper is motivated by an interest in how clusters come into being and why they emerge in particular locations. The literature includes two main views on this topic. A first view underlines that new clusters often start out in a particular location more or less by chance, often because some...

The importance of political local coalitions in shaping local governance structures conducive to economic growth has been a subject of research for numerous years, both in rich economies as well as in emerging countries. In spite of such amount of research, little attention has yet been paid to...

The overall objective of this paper is to contribute conceptually to the questions why and how regions transform and it joins the debate on economic evolution and institutional change. The paper addresses the challenge of how to conceptualise the interdependencies of institutions of different...

We analyze how regional quality affects firm’s efficiency by identifying the impaired firms receiving financial assistance as those paying an implicit interest rate lower than the prime rate. Then, we decompose them into: real impaired firms unable to repay their loans, and those not repaying...

The performance of a firm is influenced by decisions made by the firm itself as well as factors external to it. Firm competencies are important but also competencies that pertain to territories. External factors encompass different aspects of the environmental context in which firms operate,...

We present a simple model that illustrates how democracy may improve the quality of economic institutions. The model further suggests that institutional quality varies more across autocracies than across democracy and that the positive effect of democracy on institutional quality is increasing...

This paper shows how colonial powers permanently shaped the pattern of Chinese cities through the establishment of Concessions - foreign enclaves within Chinese cities. Based on a sample of 130 city districts within 10 Chinese cities, we find that districts with Concessions have higher land...

In this paper we investigate the relevance of bargaining institutions for the decline of the labor share. Several explanations for the decline exist, which consider the relevance of technology, globalization and markups. Neglected so far is the influence of bargaining institutions, in particular...