This paper provides a conceptual discussion of relatedness, which suggests a focus on individuals as a complement to firms and industries. The empirical relevance of the main arguments are tested by estimating the effects of related and unrelated variety in education and occupation among...

This study investigates the relationship between export structure and economic growth in Russian regions. We hypothesize that it is not industry variety per se but the variety of related industries located relatively close to each other in the product space that significantly contributes to...

In this paper, we study whether industrial relatedness affects firms’ fixed investment behaviour, and whether this relationship is linked also to the operational and organizational proximity between banks and local economies. By estimating different specifications of a dynamic investment...

Over the past couple of decades or so, there have been increasing moves within evolutionary theory to move beyond the neo-Darwinian principles of variety, selection and retention, and to incorporate development. This has led to a richer palette of concepts, mechanisms and models of evolution and...

Relying on a unique dataset of small, machine-tool firms located in Emilia Romagna, Italy, we estimate the separate effects of industrial relatedness and social capital on the propensity to fully or partially outsource production activities. We focus on a series of 29 production phases, for...

Although it has frequently been argued that the quality of institutions affects the innovative potential of a territory, the link between institutions and innovation remains a black box. This paper aims to shed light on how institutions shape innovative capacity, by focusing on how regional...

The origin and growth of industrial clusters have attracted the attention of scholars and policy makers since the early era of industrialisation. The seminal work by Alfred Marshall has represented the foundation for a rich strand of literature, whose late expansion and refinement were inspired...

We use the historical self-employment rate as an indicator of a regional culture of entrepreneurship and link this measure to economic growth in recent periods. The results indicate that German regions with a high level of entrepreneurship in the mid-1920s have higher start-up rates about 80...

Although informal knowledge networks have often been regarded as a key ingredient behind the success of industrial clusters, the forces that shape their structure and dynamics remain largely unknown. Drawing on recent network dynamic models, we analyze the evolution of business and technical...

Klepper developed a theory that explains the evolution of industries purely by the inheritance of firm-specific factors. Institutional approaches argue that the evolution of industries differ according to their institutional environment. We prose an extension of the heritage theory to analyse...