Why are some cities specialised and others diversified? What are the advantages and disadvantages of urban specialisation and diversity? To what extent does the structure of cities, and the activities of firms and people in them, change over time? How does the sectoral composition of cities...

How much do internal firm resources contribute to technology adoption in major urban locations, where the advantages from agglomeration are greatest? The authors address this question in the context of a business's decision to adopt advanced Internet technology. Drawing on a rich data set of...

This article presents an agent-based model (ABM) of an Italian textile district where thousands of small firms specialize in particular phases of fabrics production. It is an empirical model because it reconstructs the communications between firms when they arrange production chains. In their...

This paper follows the new economic geography approach to model the relationships between trade policy and spatial agglomeration of production in the context of a small open developing economy. We construct a general equilibrium model with interactions between centripetal forces and centrifugal...

The paper estimates the effects of organized crime on FDI inflows in 103 Italian provinces in the period 2004-06. The presence of organized crime at a provincial level is quantified through several indicators, based on data for different kinds of crimes: extortion; association for criminal...

A central purpose of this chapter is to assess whether the available empirical evidence supports the view that current levels of housing discrimination are a significant contributor to residential segregation in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. Through the course of this chapter, the reader...

This paper studies the effect of regional spillovers on the rate of firm formation in two major West German industries for the time period from 1989 to 1993. 1 exploit regional variations in firm formation at the county level to identify the effects of historically given industry structure and...

This study is the first to explore the short-run impact of armed conflict on firms’ performance and their perceptions of the business environment. We focus on the August 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia and use the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey data before and...

Una de las maneras de analizar el comportamiento del precio del suelo en una ciudad es a partir de su estructura urbana. Este trabajo analiza el gradiente de precios en Bogotá teniendo en cuenta la estructura urbana identificada para los años 1991 y 2005. La estructura urbana se define a...

Die Industrielle (Weiße) Biotechnologie (IBT) ist eine in der Bevölkerung noch weitgehend unbekannte Technologie, welche jedoch bereits jetzt zahlreiche Anwendungsmöglichkeiten in diversen Branchen, wie z. B. der Textil-, Chemie- und Lebensmittelindustrie findet. Der Freistaat Sachsen, eher...