This paper investigates some crucial aspects of the recent development of industrial districts in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where this type of spatial agglomeration of industrial firms has flourished since the period immediately after the Second World War. In particular, it is aimed at...

We examine whether discretionary government grants influence thelocation of new plants. Grants have a small effect in attracting plants to specificgeographic areas, but their effectiveness increases with agglomeration externalities,measured by the number of other plants in that location in the...

A stochastic model of the evolution of the firm population in a regionand industry is developed. This model is used to make predictions about theexpected probability distribution of the firm number in regions and their dynamics.Data on the spatial distribution of firms in Germany is used to...

The paper Investigates stability and change of regional economic activities in the longrun.As the unit of analysis we selected the machine tool industry in West Germany forthe years 1953 to 2002. We spot a strong variance in the activities between the differentregions. These differences are...

We test Krugman’s (1991) notion of risk sharing in pooled labormarkets as one of the micro-foundations of agglomerationeconomies, i.e. we examine whether firms share risks fromidiosyncratic and sector specific shocks through labor pooling.Estimating wage functions we find that job turnover...

In this paper we survey the recent developments in two empirical literatures at the crossroadsof labor and urban economics: Studies about localized human capital externalities (HCE) andabout the urban wage premium (UWP). After surveying the methods and main results of eachof these two...

This paper investigates the impacts of progressive trade openness, technological externalities,and heterogeneity of individuals on the formation of entrepreneurship in a two-countryoccupation choice model. We show that trade opening gives rise to a non-monotonic processof international...

We investigate the impact of changes in international trade and domestic transport costs on the internalgeography of a domestic economy linked to the rest of the World through a hub. We address that issue bydeveloping two three regions model, namely a version of the Footlose Entrepreneur and a...

In this paper we build a quality-augmented version of an economic geography model whereconsumers have heterogenous tastes for a set of manufacturing varieties. We discuss afootloose capital model and a footloose entrepreneur model. We show that firms selling thegoods with higher values select...

We investigate the role of the transport sector in structuring the location of economic activitywithin two-region economic geography models of the footloose capital and core-peripherytypes. In our setting, competitive carriers offer transport services for shipping manufacturedgoods across...