This paper studies the intranational business cycle - that is the set of regional (prefectural) business cycles - in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series of relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to identify...

The ratios of taxes and public expenditures, in the various Italian regions, to local Gdp changed substantially during the last century. One century ago the excess of expenditure over taxes was typical of non rural Regions (located in both North and South Italy); now that excess is typical of...

A severe earthquake in San Francisco in 1906 severed electrical and gas lines and collapsed chimneys. Fires resulted, burning for four days over 2800 acres. The commercial and residential center of the city was destroyed. Two hundred fifty thousand people of the city’s 400,000 population were...

This paper investigates the relationship between inter-firm labor mobility and regional productivity growth. Previous studies have shown that density is positively correlated with growth. I claim that it is not density in itself, but rather the attributes associated with it that drives economic...

More than a decade has now gone by since the crises of Banco di Napoli, Banco di Sicilia, Sicilcassa and the majors southern “Casse di Risparmio” have actually decreed the vanishing of an independent banking system in southern regions, but the economic and political debate on the effects of...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model that involves the endogenous determination of fertility and an explicit city structure in order to analyze fully the social and natural changes in city populations. We provide conditions under which the model exhibits the spatial features of...

The objective of this paper is to address the question of convergence across German districts in the first decade after German unification by drawing out and emphasising some stylised facts of regional per capita income dynamics. We achieve this by employing non-parametric techniques which focus...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

The objective of this study is to identify knowledge spillovers that spread across regions in Europe and vary in magnitude for different industries. The study uses a panel of 203 NUTS-2 regions covering the 15 pre-2004 EU-member-states to estimate the impact over the period 1998-2003, and...