Workforce is aging in most developed countries, but still needed in productive work. Entrepreneurship at older ages is an option for many aging individuals. As existing and future generations are healthier and more able to work than previous generations, working careers can, and also have been...

Local food systems are one solution to promote local products in different ways and particularly by bringing together producers and consumers. This paper follows different purposes. The term "local food systems" will be defined as systems mobilizing not more than one intermediate person in a...

Increased productivity is one of the main drivers of economic growth. Considering the increasing importance of the service sector in many economies studies of productivity in service firms are essential, but still rare. Questions concerning the underlying reasons for productivity differences in...

This paper estimates a heterogeneous sorting model for firms, employing a semiparametric Poisson approach. We show that there is an equivalence relation between a locally weighted Logit and Poisson model. We apply our model to estimate firm-specific preferences of business services firms for...

Advances in information and communication technologies bring along changes in working and employment conditions. Automationed work is moved to distant areas and businesses get elaborate, far from the center and network-based. Another change similar to the disintegration of production process is...

In this paper, we propose an analytical and methodological comparison between two of the most known distance-based methods in the evaluation of the geographic concentration of economic activity. These two methods are Ripley's K function, a cumulative function popularised by Marcon and Puech...

The primary focus of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on how innovation is generated and fostered under different institutional setup. Two different institutional setups which evolve from planned economy to market economy in China during the transition, i.e. top-down and bottom-up...

This paper attempts to analyze the impact of knowledge and knowledge spillovers on regional total factor productivity (TFP) in Europe. Regional patent stocks are used as a proxy for knowledge, and TFP is measured in terms of a superlative index. We follow Fischer et. al (2008) by using a...

The study of the Social Capital and its relationships with the development is a topical subject. The theme has not an exactly definition yet. Some proofs at national and regional levels in Europe show interactions between the Social Capital and the economic growth and the labour market. From...

This paper proposes a methodology to measure spatial effects of roads and local authorities' seats in a diffusion of business activity, which usually follows the distance decay patterns, from core to periphery. Regional development policy, pursued by regional authorities, directed to local units...