The term “globalization” has long been vented indiscriminately everywhere with few being capable to either define or measure it. Cities are said to be at the forefront of the “works of globalization” by becoming coordinating centers for the transnational activities of multinational...

This paper analyses the impact of skill portfolios and labour mobility on plant performance by means of a unique database that connects attributes of individuals to features of plants for the whole Swedish economy. We found that a portfolio of related competences at the plant level increases...

In the last decade, the Finnish economy has shown an unprecedented recovery, after being hit by a deep crisis in the early 1990s. The paper views and interprets this successful transformation process based on ICT from an evolutionary perspective. Although the rapid pace of the restructuring of...

Although a rich literature has emerged analyzing the impact of localization, urbanization, and Jacobs externalities on regional innovativeness, the findings are still contradictory. Traditional studies differ mainly in the employed data but rely on similar empirical approaches. This paper argues...

This paper makes an attempt to estimate the impact of regional variety and trade linkages on regional economic growth by means of export and import data by Italian province (NUTS 3) and sector (3-digit) for the period 1995-2003. Our results show strong evidence of related variety contributing to...

The paper analyses from an evolutionary perspective how retailers respond and adapt to b2c e-commerce. As such, the paper explores the diversity of behavior of retailers with respect to the adoption of e-commerce. More in particular, it examines empirically the extent to which the adoption of...

We propose a framework that specifies the process of economic development as an evolutionary branching process of product innovations. Each product innovation provides a growth opportunity for an existing firm or a new firm, and for an existing city or a new city. One can then obtain both firm...

Few industries are more concentrated than the global fashion industry. We analyse the geography and evolution of the ready-to-wear fashion design industry by looking at the yearly entry rates following an organizational ecology approach. In contrast to earlier studies on manufacturing...

A widely held view in cluster research is that clusters are characterized by the presence of networks of local collective learning. However, with a growing number of studies indicating this is not necessarily the case, the question arises under which conditions clusters exhibit dense networks of...

The cluster literature suffers from a number of shortcomings: (1) by and large, cluster studies do not take into account that firms in a cluster are heterogeneous in terms of capabilities; (2) cluster studies tend to overemphasize the importance of place and geographical proximity and...