Innovation and technological change are central to the quest for regional development. In the globally-connected knowledge-driven economy, the relevance of agglomeration forces that rely on proximity continues to increase, paradoxically despite declining real costs of information, communication...

This paper employs a unique set of micro-data covering almost one third of the Dutch labor force, to estimate the relationship between agglomeration externalities and the level of education. While the positive relationship between economic density and productivity and wages has long been...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of inequality on economic growth. Both theoretical and empirical approaches have produced ambiguous results on sign and size of this relationship. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality...

In this paper we perform a meta-analysis on empirical estimates of the impact between investment and uncertainty. Since the outcomes of primary studies are largely incomparable with respect to the magnitude of the effect, our analysis focuses on the direction and statistical significance of the...

Outsourcing of non-core activities by firms is nowadays a common business strategy. This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing a firms' incentive to follow such a strategy and its consequences for macroeconomic variables like growth and product variety. We divide production...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on growth and convergence that has addressed the importance of spatial factors. An important distinction in this literature is the one between absolute and relative location. The literature on absolute location predominantly uses non-spatial...

Concentration of immigrants and its associated externalities have become an important topic in contemporary international migration research, both from a methodological as well as an empirical perspective. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, it aims to provide an overview of that part...

In this paper, we employ techniques developed in spatial econometrics to analyze spatial patterns of technology diffusion, to detect clusters and to estimate theoretical models that incorporate space explicitly. These techniques correct for misspecifications resulting from the omission of...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of decoupling economic growth and energy use and its various determinants by exploring trends in energy - and labour productivity across 10 manufacturing sectors and 14 OECD countries for the period 1970-1997. We explicitly aim to trace back aggregate...

This paper addresses the interplay between economic growth, energy use, change in sectoral composition and technological change, by exploring trends in energy- and labour-productivity development for 14 OECD countries and four sectors over the period 1970-1997. A cross-country decomposition...