This paper estimates the determinants of labour productivity in European NUTS regions during 1989-1996. We compare three potential explanations of regional advantages: Technological capabilities (proxied by regional patents), agglomeration economies (employment density), and openness. To study the latter we use the number of airplane passengers embarked and disembarked in the region, and found ...

We use new data on the location and background of entrants into the US tyre industry to analyse why the industry became so regionally concentrated around Akron, Ohio, a small city with no compelling advantages for tyre production. We analyse where the Ohio entrants originated and conduct various analyses of how proximity to other tyre firms affected the longevity of tyre producers. We also exam...

We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation, in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region?s stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge ...

Literature suggests that location should matter for R&D activities. However, attempts to empirically detect differences in innovation activity between regions have so far been rather unsuccessful. Using a unique data set which contains comparable information about manufacturing enterprises in eleven European regions, a number of significant regional differences in the efficiency of innovation a...

This Inquiry final research report investigates agglomeration economies and their ability to alter the economic productivity of cities, together with what are key drivers population growth mobility in Australia.

The issue of whether firm productivity is affected by agglomeration externalities a longstanding area research. However, the appropriate geographical level to better detect effects economies and at which these work still unclear. Using detailed firm-level longitudinal data on 4927 manufacturing firms in United Kingdom over period 2008–2016, we investigate relation between microgeography externa...