Companies invest in research and development (R&D) to safeguard their competitive ability and increase productivity. Using extensive company data for Germany, the study shows that manufacturing companies that engage in R&D activities and that are located in a central urban agglomeration are...

Unternehmen investieren in Forschung und Entwicklung (FuE), um ihre Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zu sichern und die Produktivität zu erhöhen. Mit umfangreichen Unternehmensdaten für Deutschland kann hier gezeigt werden, dass forschende Industrieunternehmen in zentralen städtischen...

While it is clear that there has been a 'regional inversion' in American patent activity over the past 25 years (i.e. relative rise of the Northwest and Southwest at the expense of the traditional invention hotbeds of the Northeast and Midwest), the reason is still open to speculation. Intuition...

The regional or national innovation performance has been repeatedly measured in the literature; but it has so far not been discussed what this means, especially in relation to a region. What is the contribution of a region to innovation output? The usual approaches implicitly assume that higher...

In this paper we use the NEG framework of the Helpman model to investigate the spatial distribution of wages across German labour market regions under different assumptions. As the assumptions of equal regional price level and equal real wages are strongly rejected for the German economy,...

In this paper, the process of productivity convergence is investigated for the enlarged European Union using regional (NUTS-2) data. The Solow model extended by human capital is employed as a workhorse. Alternative strategies are proposed to control for spatial effects. All specifications...

This study examines the impact of localization and urbanization economies as well as the impact of city size on urban growth in German cities from 2003 to 2007. Although, from a theoretical perspective, agglomeration economies are supposed to have positive impacts on regional growth, prior...

In explaining the uneven spatial distribution of economic activity, urban economics and new economic geography (NEG) dominate recent research in economics. A main difference between these two approaches is that NEG stresses the role of spatial linkages whereas urban economics does not do so. We...

Der Strukturwandel zu wissensbasierten Dienstleistungen und der High Tech Branche bedingt eine steigende Nachfrage nach hochqualifizierten Arbeitnehmern. Für eine erfolgreiche Regionalentwicklung ist daher ein ausreichender Bestand an Hochqualifizierten unabdingbar. Vor dem Hintergrund des sich...

This paper evaluated the role of infrastructure on the productivity of industries in the Brazilian mesoregions. We found that infrastructure positively affects the efficiency of industries, although due to the size of the estimated coefficients, this influence is small. Considering the average...