We study the pattern of concentration of industries in EU countries and regions between 1972 and 1995. We find that changes in concentration levels were mainly due to industry mobility rather than historical accidents and past levels of concentration as often argued by the New Economic Geography...

We examine the importance of a firm's own R&D activity and intra-sectoral spillovers on the decision to export and the export intensity using firm level panel data for Spain for the period 1990 to 1998. Our results are in line with preceding findings on the role played by firm-specific variables...

We examine the way in which differences in language and culture may affect direct investment decisions. We use a discrete choice approach to model the location decisions of multinationals in which cultural links, language differences, distance and market access are accounted for. This model is...

We investigate and compare the spatial distribution of manufacturing activity and its determinants in Belgium, Ireland, and Portugal using comparable, exhaustive micro-level data sets. We find some similarities between Portugal and Belgium, but little for Ireland. Moreover, there is some...

Factual evidence suggests that ICT-led growth and ICT-producing sectors are strongly localised geographically. Given that the nature of ongoing technological change and innovation dynamics has a strong local/regional component, public policies need to be designed at this level as well. However,...

We investigate the role that climatic change has played in the pattern of urbanization in sub-Saharan countries compared to the rest of the developing world. To this end we assemble a cross-country panel data set that allows us to estimate the determinants of urbanization. The results of our...

This paper provides empirical evidence of the relevance of supply- and demand-driven externalities in determining sectoral employment growth for 18 industrial sectors on a set of OECD countries. The paper improves over the existing literature in two ways. First, we use dynamic panel estimation...

We extend the Bahk and Gort (1993) approach of testing for the impact of learning by doing (LBD) on firm productivity using data on a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms over the 1990-1998 period. While our results indicate evidence in support of the role of LBD, we show that this hinges on...