The focus of this study is on regional knowledge production activities in Europe, with special emphasis on the interplay between agglomeration and network effects. As increasingly considered in economic geography and regional science in the recent past, regional knowledge production activities,...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of various proximity dimensions on the innovative capacity of 276 regions in Europe within a knowledge production function model, where R&D and human capital are included as the main internal inputs. We combine the standard geographical...

This study represents a first attempt to empirically analyze the role of firm heterogeneity in regional business cycle behaviour. Working with monthly Italy's firms data and estimating a random effects ordered probit model, we first document sizable asymmetries in Northern and Southern firms...

This paper draws on a sample of innovative Catalan firms to identify the effects of the two main sources of innovation - internal R&D and external R&D acquisition - on productivity in the manufacturing and service industries. The sample comprises a 3,267 firms from the CIS-4 for the years...

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,...

There is a large literature on the existence of agglomeration economies, as shown in the surveys by Moomaw (1983) or Gerking (1993). The benefits of these economies arise from multiple sources, but some negative externalities might also emerge. Within the hierarchical urban system, cities at...

The productivity generated by capital goods is not uniform along the time. When there exist conventional physical capital goods the productivity obtained is minor that the one generated by quality capital goods. To obtain a correct measure of growth in presence of this embodied technical...

Standard growth accounting exercises find large cross-country differences in aggregate TFP. Here we ask whether specific sectors are driving these differences, and, if this is the case, which these problem sectors are. We argue that to answer these questions we need to consider four sectors. In...

Agriculture plays an important role for Kazakhstan not only because of rural employment, but also because of the diversity it brings to its oil dependent economy. A considerable increase in grain exports was achieved during the recent years, however, there still is a large room for increasing...

This paper estimates the non-linear impact of ICT network on motorway contribution to total factor productivity. Using dynamic panel data of OECD member countries, the paper finds that there exists a critical mass of broadband penetration rate which has the property that if this threshold level...