This guide gives tips on how to do (quantitative) research and on how to write it up. These insights seem to hold throughout all (social) sciences. I illustrate them using examples from finance and economics. My main goal is to save budding researchers time by preventing them from doing bad...

From 1980-2009 the Polish economy experienced structural dislocation. The growth and success of the Solidarity movement represented the shift in manufacturing from Soviet bloc trade to membership in the European Union. This paper examines four independent metrics that measure the changing...

This paper analyses the geographical specialisation of 32 manufacturing sectors over the 1972-1996 period, based on annual employment and export data for 13 European countries. Specialisation has increased continuously over the sample period in employment terms, while remaining roughly unchanged...

Employing a 'factor-content' model that relates sectoral growth to regional factor endowments, we find that 1) U.S. state factor endowments are reasonably strong correlates of cross-state sectoral growth in value-added, with patterns that accord well with intuition; 2) that inter-sectoral...

One account of spatial concentration focuses on productivity advantages arising from market size. We investigate this for forty regions of Japan. Our results identify important effects of a region's own size, as well as cost linkages between producers and suppliers of inputs. Productivity links...

This paper analyses some of the forces that are changing the spatial distribution of activity in the world economy. It draws on the 'new economic geography' literature to argue the importance of increasing returns to scale and cumulative causation processes in shaping the productivity and...

Economic activity in Argentina shows a high degree of concentration, in 1993 almost 46% of GDP was generated in an area representing just 0.14% of the country. When looking at the manufacturing sector the concentration is still higher. The new economic geography models developed since the early...

We consider the effect of export sophistication on economic performance using regional variations within a single country (China) over the period 1997-2007. We confirm Hausmann, Hwang and Rodrik (2007)’s prediction that regions that engage in the cost discovery process of developing...

We examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphologic feature in the southeastern U.S. marking the final rapids on rivers before the ocean. Historically, waterborne transport of goods required portage around the falls at these...

We analyze the spatial interaction among regions in North America and in Western Europe. We use a gravity model extended by a spatial correlation structure where data allows to evaluate the spatial interaction in two dimensions: level of impact and the length of the spatial tail. This allows us...