Firms competitive strategies and performances in industrialised countries is increasingly based on assets, labelled as “intangible capital”, such as the inventions of new processes and products, the improvements of the employees skill, the creation of a reputation for company’s products....

It is well known that firms productivity is influenced by information spillovers generated either by other firms located nearby or by direct contacts with final demand or by foreign demand in the case of traded products. In this paper we investigate a new channel of efficiency - enhancing...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of various proximity dimensions on the innovative capacity of 276 regions in Europe within a knowledge production function model, where R&D and human capital are included as the main internal inputs. We combine the standard geographical...

The recent history of Europe is characterized by a dual picture showing the Old and New countries in sharp contrast with respect to their industrial specialisation and economic performance. We aim at analyzing the intertwined performance of regions and industries in New and Old European...

The paper explores the concurrent effects of cultural, political, and spatial distances on M&A flows occurring between any two countries belonging to the whole European Union (27 States) or to the European Neighbors group (16 States) over the period 2000-2011 . By employing zero-inflated...

Regional competitiveness, especially in the industrialised countries, is increasingly reliant on the availability of an adequate endowment of knowledge assets at the local level, like technological and human capital. These intangible factors enhance regional efficiency directly as inputs of the...

The paper analyzes the impact of domestic and international tourism on the economic growth process for 179 European regions. The econometric analysis is based on a spatial growth regression framework where the rate of GDP per capita growth at the regional level for the period 1999-2009 is...

Building on previous literature providing extensive evidence on flows of knowledge generated by inter-firm agreements, in this paper we aim to analyse how the occurrence of such collaborations is driven by the multi-dimensional proximity among participants and by their position within firms’...

The aim of this paper is to assess the role played by creativity and other components of human capital on the process of economic growth for 257 regions in the 27 member countries of the European Union. We first decompose the regional human capital endowment to distinguish between the...

There is a large consensus among social researchers on the positive role played by human capital on economic performances. The standard way to measure the human capital endowment is to consider the educational attainments by the resident population, usually the share of people with a university...