Consider a model of location choice by two sorts of agents, called “buyers”and “sellers:”In the first period agents simultaneously choose between two identical possible locations; following this, the agents at each location play some sort of game with the other agents there. Buyers prefer locations with fewer other buyers and more sellers, and sellers have the reverse preferences. We study the ...

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence on the one hand and persistent or even increasing spatial concentration (agglomeration) on the other. Kernel density estimation, Markov chain analysis and...

We investigate the importance of market size as a determinant for industrial location patterns. In order to focus on a broad range of sectors, including services, both traded and non-traded goods are taken into consideration. In our model, traded goods industries always exhibit a ‘home market effect’ (HME), whereas the existence of such an effect for non-traded goods crucially hinges on the deg...

Unaffordable Housing and Local Employment Growth: Evidence from California Municipalities It is widely believed that unaffordable housing could drive businesses away and thus impede job growth. However, there is little evidence to support this view. This paper presents a simple model to clarify how housing affordability is linked to employment growth and why unaffordable housing could negativel...

This paper contributes to the debate on the inducement of environmental innovations by analysing the extent to which endogenous inducement mechanisms spur the generation of greener technologies in contexts characterized by weak exogenous inducement pressures. In the presence of a fragile environmental regulatory framework, inducement can indeed be endogenous and environmental innovations may be...

This paper presents an analysis of the co-evolutionary patterns of structural change in knowledge and economics. The former is made operational through an analysis of co-occurrences of technological classes in patent documents in order to derive indicators of coherence, variety and cognitive distance. The latter, on the other hand, is made operational in a synthetic way by implementing shift sh...

We provide cross-country evidence to examine how financial market development affects innovation. Using a large data set including 34 developed as well as emerging countries, we differentiate the impacts of equity market and credit market development on a country’s innovation productivity measured by patenting. Our baseline results show that, while the development of equity markets encourages i...

We examine the long-term impacts of drought on local labor markets in Brazil. Using rainfall data going back over a century, we build contemporaneous and historical drought indices for more than 3,000 local areas, and examine them in conjunction with five waves of population census data spanning 1970−2010. Results from a differencein-differences design reveal that increased drought frequency in...

This paper uses an institutional approach to investigate the relationship between the regional institutional environment and regional new firm formation. The importance of perceived attitudes regarding private enterprises, local taxes, political majority, the size of the government sector and perceived rules and bureaucracy on new firm formation in 286 Swedish municipalities are investigated. T...