This paper provides some empirical evidence of the impact of two policy measures, aiming at supporting innovative activity of small and medium firms in Piedmont. Both measures use European Structural Funds, but are managed at a regional level. Measure 2.1b, a concessional loan aiming at...

What is region? From an economic point of view, a region is a unit in which capital and labour move freely and goods and services are totally open to trade with other regions without any frontiers or limitations. The openness of the regions and their interaction with other regions are their main...

The recent history of Europe is characterized by a dual picture showing the Old and New countries in sharp contrast with respect to their industrial specialisation and economic performance. We aim at analyzing the intertwined performance of regions and industries in New and Old European...

There is a large consensus among social researchers on the positive role played by human capital on economic performances. The standard way to measure the human capital endowment is to consider the educational attainments by the resident population, usually the share of people with a university...

This article describes the development of international trade blocs world wide from the 1950s till 2010. We updated the data on international trade flows and introduced a new trade bloc variable based on the intramax hierarchical clustering technique, which defines trade blocs on actual trade...

The migration literature shows that cross-border skill transfer is associated with a risk of increased job-education mismatch. This paper examines whether the problems of job-education mismatch often found among migrants also apply to cross-border commuters and compares cross-border commuters to...

The EU regions have been experiencing a period of unprecedented change. The ongoing (and parallel) processes of EU integration and enlargement have progressively transformed regional economies to integral parts of the emerging (European) socio-economic space, exposing them to the forces and the...

We develop an empirical approach to examine static and dynamic knowledge externalities in the context of a regional total factor productivity relationship. Static externalities refer to current period scale or industry-size effects which have been labeled localization externalities or...