In this paper we compare the magnitude of local productivity advantages associated to two different spatial concentration patterns in Italy, i.e. urban areas (UA) and industrial districts (ID). UA typically display a huge concentration of population and host a wide range of economic activities,...

This paper evaluates the impact of accessibility on the productivity of Spanish manufacturing firms. We suggest the use of accessibility indicators to workers and commodities, integrating transport, land use, and individual components in their measurement, and computing real distances or...

We compute aggregate productivity of three categories of regions, classified by level of urbanization in the Netherlands, from firm-specific total factor productivity (TFP) measures. TFP measures are estimated by a semi-parametric algorithm, within 2-digit industries, covering agriculture,...

In this paper we estimate agglomeration economies in Spain in 2009 basing on Ciccone?s (2002) model, which explains average labor productivity in one spatial unit on employment density and other controls. The novelty of our analysis is that the empirical model is estimated at a highly...

Empirical evidence on economies of scale in healthcare is mostly based on the cost effects of hospital mergers. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper approaches the economies of scale issue by analysing the break-ups of municipal health centre federations. We use the...

This paper analyses the effect of innovation on the well-established productivity-export association in the literature. Here, we argue that actively innovative firms have a higher productivity, which make them more likely to become exporters. Moreover, exporting firms learn from their trading...

In population declining countries, public services in rural areas face potential problematic issues on the long-run sustainability, which are namely brought by insufficient economies of scale. Since these services play important roles as social infrastructure elements, a disappearance from the...

In this paper, we undertake an in-depth inquiry into the nature of sharing externalities, and study how they affect the market outcome. We show that the key thing for understanding sharing externalities is the interplay between two forces: the specialization/complexity effect, on the one hand,...

This paper investigates the factors that influence the change in passenger ski-lift transports between a normal winter and an anomalously mild winter based on individual lift and aggregate ski-area data. Special focus is placed on the return on investments in new ski lifts. Using endogenous...

The focus of the paper is on evaluating the productivity gap between rural and urban locations in the UK using micro data. We build a structural model of the unobservable productivity emphasising the link between productivity and spatial density of economic activity and adapt the semi-parametric...