This paper introduces cultural gravity as a new concept for analyzing socio-economic disparities among immigrants. It tests the existence of cultural gravity effects on the geographic concentration and human capital productivity of immigrants. Using cultural distance as a proxy for the local...

Over the past decades, leisure travel has become increasingly popular in older segments of the world population, as a consequence of global factors such as a rise in life expectancy, improved health conditions, a higher disposable income, and increased availability of discretionary time in...

This study analyses the impact of cultural composition on regional attractiveness from the perspective of migrant sorting behaviour. We use an attitudinal survey to quantify cultural distances between natives and immigrants in the area concerned, and estimate the migrants' varying preferences...

Biodiversity prospecting refers to the exploration of the commercial value of genetic and biochemical resources. In this chapter, we study a drug producing pharmaceutical firm (PF) that searches for potentially useful chemicals made by wild organisms in a conservation area. This PF is able to...

We use a dynamic model to study the effects of technology and learning on the long run economic growth rates of a leading and a lagging region. New technologies are developed in the leading region but technological improvements in the lagging region are the result of learning from the leading...

We study innovation and the resulting Schumpeterian economic growth that this innovation gives rise to in a model with N heterogeneous regions. For each region i where i=1,...,N, our analysis leads to five findings. First, we define the balanced growth path (BGP) allocations and the equilibrium...

An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf's law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this 'law' holds remained...

The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in an...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of ethnic female entrepreneurship in urban economic life. The focus of the research is on the attitude and behaviour of Turkish female entrepreneurs in Amsterdam. The main fascinating question is: Are ethnic female entrepreneurs special...