Usually housing is viewed in the context of consumption resulting from other economic drivers such as income and employment. Here, we study how two key local economic measures, the gross metropolitan product (GMP) and unemployment rate, respond to shocks in home value appreciation, home sales, and new construction, respectively. Our analysis relies upon a large panel of 158 metropolitan statist...

In this introduction the editors showcase the papers by way of a structured project and seek to clarify the two key concepts cited in the title. We consider the history of the idea that knowledge is an economic factor, and discuss the question of whether regions provide the relevant system of reference for knowledge-based economic development. Current transformations in university-industry-gove...

Article history: Received 14 August 2007 Revised 8 July 2008 Available online 23 August 2008 JEL classification: J61 J64 E24 P23 R11 O33

urbanization agglomeration that is named jacobs externalities, refers to the role of economic diversification in urban. localization agglomeration, marshal-arrow-romer (mar) externalities, is related to the concentration of firms activated in a special industry within a specified place. the purpose of this research is to explore the impact of different types of agglomeration economies on employ...

Empirical analyses suggest that the employment creating effect of start-ups is highest in regions with a low level of new business formation and that an increase in the regional start-up rate beyond a certain level may lead to negative employment effect. In explaining these results, we assume that the average quality of regional start-ups decreases with the number of start-ups, while the costs ...

Adopting a time series convergence definition and panel unit root testing procedures, we fail to reject the null hypothesis of no convergence in GDP per capita across former West German states. This result stands in contrast to the findings of previous studies for West German regions using cross-section regression techniques and is contrary to the time series findings for the United States. Fro...

In this paper we aim at studying to what extent spillovers between firms may foster economic growth. The attention is addressed to the spillovers connected with the R&D activity that improves the quality of the goods firms supply. Our model develops a growth theory framework and we assume that firms spread around a circle. Our study assesses that spillovers between neighbors affect the probabil...

Does Local Business Ownership Insulate Cities from Economic Shocks? * We assess a prominent argument for local economic policies that favor locally-owned businesses – namely, that locally-owned firms are more likely to internalize the costs to the community of decisions to reduce employment and hence help to insulate cities from adverse economic shocks. We test this argument by examining how es...

This paper extends the recent empirical literature on the relationship between local decentralization and growth using data from both metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions in the U.S. The analysis utilizes both metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions, and thus avoids the possible selection bias present in previous research. The results for non-metropolitan regions indicate a relatively we...

There is a well-documented cross-country literature on the relationship between finance and growth. This paper contributes to this literature by analysing the relationships between financial intermediation and economic growth within the regions of one country, rather than different countries. The focus on regions is relevant since regional information is more homogeneous, the legal and institut...