This paper is an introductory overview highlighting some of the current knowledge as regards three critical questions related to the emerging knowledge economy: i) Why does human capital and talent tend to agglomerate in large urban regions?, ii) How does this agglomeration affect the location...

Despite broad agreement on the strategic role of SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) in industrial renewal processes, the lack of systematized and comprehensive information on the nature and level of small innovative firms is striking. This bias is partly explained by an empirical shadow...

The motivation of this paper is the rather naive approach to debt as a financing source of R&D investment in the empirical investment literature. I focus on long-term relational debt based on its appealing contractual properties and discover a debt overhang effect for the relationship between...

Do agglomerations stimulate productivity? An extensive literature on agglomeration economies, or urban increasing returns, has analyzed this question with aggregated spatial data. This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and productivity at the firm level using static and...

Innovation processes in emerging fields of technology frequently utilize scientific knowledge and technical skills from several research areas. Likewise, technological development frequently involves a diverse set of organizations including for example private firms, universities, corporate...

The returns to education have been thoroughly investigated and Sweden has shown to have a relatively low return compared to other countries in Europe. Nevertheless, few studies have combined the regional perspective with returns to education. Hence, the purpose of the paper is to analyze...

This paper presents the results of a pan-Nordic study to explore how small and medium-size enterprises use IPR. It is a pilot study that demonstrates a commonly developed approach designed to overcome the barriers that hinder study of IPR use by small firms. The pilot study focuses particularly...

This paper studies the role of geographic proximity for interaction on R&D, by exploring the special case of university-industry contacts. While numerous studies find that geographic proximity facilitates spillover effects between university and industry by utilising evidence from e.g. patenting...

The relationship between start-up rates and regional economic development has been studied rather extensively in recent years. Dynamics in start-up rates have however received considerably less attention. In this paper we analyze the persistence of start-up rates across Swedish regions over a...

This study proposes an alternative methodology for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth. The rationale of this methodology is to consider the features of technology appropriately by excluding a spurious technical regress based on the macroeconomic perspective. In order to...