House price capitalization – the adjustment of house prices to changes in local public service and tax levels – has long been thought to be a means of testing for efficiency in the local public sector. In this article I argue that the extent of house price capitalization itself may have...

Ethnic inventors play important roles in US innovation systems, especially in high-tech regions like Silicon Valley. Do ‘ethnicity-innovation’ channels exist elsewhere? This paper investigates, using a new panel of UK patents microdata. In theory, ethnicity might affect positively innovation...

Recent substantive reforms to the English National Health Service expanded patient choice and encouraged hospitals to compete within a market with fixed prices. This study investigates whether these reforms led to improvements in hospital quality. We use a difference-in-difference-style...

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE) theory, in which wages relate to employment density. The paper makes an...

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is well equipped to deal with conflicting, qualitative objectives when evaluating strategic options. Scenario planning provides a framework for confronting uncertainty, which MCDA lacks. Integration of these methods offers various advantages, yet its...

Modern central business districts are characterised by high-rise office buildings. Helsley and Strange (2008) argue that skyscrapers are caused by agglomeration economies and a prize for being the tallest, so a reputation effect. We aim to test the relevance of this model by investigating the...

Power law or generalized polynomial regressions with unknown real-valued exponents and coefficients, and weakly dependent errors, are considered for observations over time, space or space-time. Consistency and asymptotic normality of nonlinear least squares estimates of the parameters are...

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This article uses the European Patent Office Worldwide Patent Statistical Database to examine the geographic distribution and global diffusion of inventions in thirteen climate-mitigation technologies since 1978. The data suggest that until 1990 innovation was driven mostly by energy prices....

Explaining the growth and change of regions and cities is one of the great challenges for social science. The field of economic geography and associated economics has developed frameworks in recent years that, while tackling major questions in spatial economic development, are deficient in their...