Our study provides evidence for firms' evaluation of location quality. We use a 2004 survey of 6,000 East German firms that contained questions on the importance and assessment of 15 different location factors ranging from closeness to customers and suppliers, transport infrastructure, and...

Nowadays, a process can be observed in Germany where electricity producing and trading firms react to the electricity market liberalisation by merging market shares, since the year 2000, which reduces the number of suppliers and influences production and consumer prices. This paper discusses...

Recent studies suggest a considerable amount of horizontal strategic interaction amongst governments exists. The empirical approach in these studies typically relies on estimating reaction functions in a uni-dimensional policy framework, where a nonzero slope estimate suggests strategic...

Italy makes for a very interesting case study of the impact of social variables on economic performance. Across its provinces, differences in social and cultural attitudes seem associated to large differences in economic development. We analyze the importance of some social variables on...

This paper examines the effects of agglomeration economies (AE) on the sensitivity of firm location to tax differentials. An initial reading of the story suggests that, with AE, when a firm moves into a community attracted by a tax reduction, other firms may decide to move in as well. This...

This paper has two goals. First, it analyzes the extent to which the innovativeness of spin-offs, either born from a research facility or from another company, is influenced by locational conditions. Second, it provides evidence on how important local cooperation links are in comparison to...

This paper gives an empirical analysis of the impact of regional conditions on regional manufacturing employment growth. Based upon a firm-level panel of manufacturing establishments in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany, which can be aggregated to regional panel data for forty-four counties, both the...

Foreign-owned firms are frequently viewed as an important source of new capital, access to world markets and employment generation and there exist numerous studies on the determinants of FDI flows and the role of incentives designed to attract FDI. Similarly important for economic growth are...

This paper provides some elements to explain the observed takeover in some urban areas of a new kind of elite associated with new economy jobs, also known as "bourgeois bohème" (bobos). This takeover has been associated with greater investment in urban amenities and "clean" means of transport,...