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...

Agglomeration economies play an important role in the explanation of the development and regional growth. For this reason, there exists a growing interest in the analysis of standards of co-localisation of the economic activities. This topic has been dealt with from different approaches using a...

When making decisions, agents tend to make use of decisions others have made in similar situations. Ignoring this behavior in empirical models can be interpreted as a problem of omitted variables and may seriously bias parameter estimates and harm inference. We suggest a possibility of...

This paper investigates how the services of public capital affect the different sectors of private economy in Italy. For this purpose, we use a trans-logarithmic cost function which includes infrastructure’s services as a quasi-fixed free input. This approach allows to measure the effects of...

In this paper we determine the effect of transport cost on commuting flows, on the basis of an analysis of home-to-work journeys between municipalities in Denmark. Special attention is given to a proper estimation method and the form of the distance-decay function. It appears that neither an...

Estimation and inference in the spatial econometrics literature are carried out assuming that the matrix of spatial or network connections has uniformly bounded absolute column sums in the number of cross-section units, n. In this paper, we consider spatial models where this restriction is...

This paper proposes a semiparametric estimator for spatial autoregressive (SAR) binary choice models in the context of panel data with fixed effects. The estimation procedure is based on the observational equivalence between distribution free models with a conditional median restriction and...

The EU regions have been experiencing a period of unprecedented change. The ongoing (and parallel) processes of EU integration and enlargement have progressively transformed regional economies to integral parts of the emerging (European) socio-economic space, exposing them to the forces and the...

Forecasting regional variables provides very important information for political, institutional and economic agents. However, in the present context characterized by important decline of economies, heterogeneous data and regional interdependencies, it is even more difficult to carry out accurate...