Theoretical and empirical research suggests a connection between the presence of role models and the emergence of entrepreneurs. Existing entrepreneurs may act as role models for self-employment candidates by providing successful examples. By explicitly considering the self-employment rates of...

In any economic analysis, regions or municipalities should not be regarded as isolated spatial units, but rather as highly interrelated small open economies. These spatial interrelations must be considered also when the aim is to forecast economic variables. For example, policy makers need...

Socio-economic interrelationships among regions can be measured in terms of economic flows, migration, or physical geographically-based measures, such as distance or length of shared areal unit boundaries. In general, proximity and openness tend to favour a similar economic performance among...

The present paper investigates, for the case of Germany, the relevance of the volume and distribution of commuting flows, as well as of the commuting network’s connectivity and topology. We aim to assess how network topology and its changes over time affect the geographic commuting system and...

Simulating the structure and evolution of complex networks is an area that has recently received considerable attention. Most of this research has grown out of the physical sciences, but there is growing interest in their application to the social sciences, especially regional science and...

Research and development (R&D) in the field of nanomaterials is expected to be a major driver of innovation and economic growth. Consequently, it is of great interest to understand which factors facilitate the creation of new technological knowledge. The existing literature has typically...

Regions, independent of their geographic level of aggregation, are known to be interrelated partly due to their relative locations. Similar economic performance among regions can be attributed to proximity. Consequently, a proper understanding, and accounting, of spatial liaisons is needed in...

In this paper, we present a review of various computational experiments concerning neural network (NN) models developed for regional employment forecasting. NNs are nowadays widely used in several fields because of their flexible specification structure. A series of NN experiments is presented...

Nanomaterials are seen as a key technology for the 21st Century, and much is expected of them in terms of innovation and economic growth. They could open the way to many radically new applications, which would form the basis of innovative products. As nanomaterials are still in their infancy,...

This paper develops a flexible multi-dimensional assessment method for the comparison of different statistical-econometric techniques based on learning mechanisms, with a view to analysing and forecasting regional labour markets. The aim of this paper is twofold. A first major objective is to...