This essay describes methodological approaches and pitfalls common to studies of the economic impact of colleges and universities. Such studies often claim local benefits that imply annualized rates of return on local investment exceeding 100 percent. We address problems in these studies...

Community colleges are an important and growing segment of the U.S. higher education market. However, few ex post studies of their local economic development impacts are available. This paper presents a quasi-experimental control group analysis of a group of twenty-one counties where community...

This work attempts to examine how the global financial crisis has affected the education sector and more specifically, universities. So our paper examines the universities public funding especially in Europe, the mobility of teaching staff, students etc. Also the impact of the financial crisis...

The geographical diffusion of universities has been recently incentivized in Europe by the growing relevance attributed to them as a driver of local development and as a source of learning for firms. However, the decision processes about the location of the new universities and the design of...

Knowledge flows from universities to the regional economy can take different forms ranging from formal research collaborations to consultancy and informal personal connections. One of the knowledge communication channels drawing substantial interest of both researchers and regional policy makers...

In this paper we examine the evolution of network formation. We present a model in which companies in an industry can innovate alone or in alliance with others. Alliance formation is based on the cognitive distance of companies. If two companies form an alliance, their probability of success in...

Die Neugründung und der Ausbau von Hochschulen gehören zu dem gängigen Instrumenten der regionalen Strukturpolitik. Welche Auswirkungen aber hat die Existenz einer Hochschule in ökonomischer Hinsicht tatsächlich für eine Region? Das vorliegende Paper analysiert und vergleicht die...

The paper focuses on the specific role of mid-range universities in knowledge transfer and explores the knowledge flows from these mid-range universities facing a number of extra constraints in transitional Central Eastern European (CEE) regions. Mid-range universities, very often located...

This paper focuses on the Central-European (so called „centrope") region. This region was created by a co-operation project 10 years ago, and also functions today including Vienna and other Austrian provinces such as Lower Austria and Burgenland, the region of South-Moravia in the Czech...