The aim of this paper is to estimate the effect of research externalities across space, in generating innovation.We do so by using R&D and patent data for eighty-six European Regions in the 1977-1995 period. We find that spillovers exist for regions within a distance of 300 Km from each other....

We study the effects ''globalization'' on wage inequality. Our ''global'' economy resembles Rosen (1981) ''Superstars'' economy, where a) innovations in production and communication technologies enable suppliers to reach a larger mass of consumers and to improve the (perceived) quality of their...

A literature has developed to substantiate Rosenstein-Rodan's intuition that coordination of a critical mass of investments may induce industrialization through a 'big push'. This literature has essentially ignored the question of what economic institutions may overcome the coordination failures...

We wish to analyze the consequences of strategically sophisticated bidding without assuming equilibrium behavior. As a first step, we characterize interim rationalizable bids in first-price auctions with interdependent values and affiliated signals. We show that (1) every non-zero bid below the...

The increasing literature on the interactions between liberalisation-integration of product markets and labour market reforms is often highly speculative and draws on a rather weak empirical basis. Cross-country indicators of regulatory frameworks are often lacking, making it difficult to...

The Importance of innovation for the economic performance of industrialized countries has been largely stressed recently by the theoretical and empirical literature. Very few studies have carefully considered the determinants of European innovation, the productivity of its R&D and the existence...

To the layman, the upward trend in European unemployment is related to the slowdown in economic growth. We argue that the layman's view is correct. The increase in European unemployment and the slowdown in economic growth are related, because they stem from a common cause: an excessively high...

The recent dismal performance of overall job creation has left Italy, as of the end of the 90's, with very low participation and high unemployment rates. Moreover, Italy exhibits a large regional dispersion of those variables when compared to similar European Union economies. The present paper,...

Aggregate data from the regions of Southern Italy are used to test whether risk is a significant determinant of the decision to migrate abroad or inside the country. This indeed appears to be the case for both foreign and domestic migrations, after controlling for unemployment and wage...

Data on IT spending and investment unambiguously show that the European Union as a whole has eventually caught up with the United States in recent years. Throughout 1992-2001, two thirds of the EU population reached - or came much closer to - the same levels of IT diffusion as the United States....