Recent empirical evidence strongly supports Jacobs’ (1969) externality hypothesis, that urban diversity provides a more favorable environment for economic development. In order to correctly gauge Jacobs’ hypothesis, economic development should be understood as a result of innovations....

In general there is agreement about the positive impacts of R&D on performance of firms measured as productivity, profitability and growth. However, the opposite relationship is less obvious and very little attention has been paid on examining the feedback from performance on investment. This...

The link between proximity and innovation has been dwelled upon extensively in the literature. A regional economic milieu characterized by proximity between relevant actors is maintained to be suitable for establishing and maintaining successful regional innovation system. In this paper it is...

The paper studies innovative performance of 130 Swedish corporations for 1993-94, using number of patents per corporation as a function of internal and external knowledge sources to the corporation. A coherent way of handling accessibility measures, within and between corporations located across...

An empirical method to identify the existence of a spatial cluster is proposed. The method, based upon regression analysis, offers researchers to categorise regions, municipalities, or cities with respect to their over- or under-representation in number of establishments and employment for any...

In recent decades the world has witnessed the emergence of a global knowledge economy. For example, the evolution in recent decades of the developed economies has been accompanied by a regional shift in economic activity away from traditional industrial regions to new agglomerations of high...

The main purpose in this paper is to study to what extent accessibility to R&D can explain patent production. Therefore a knowledge production function is estimated both on aggregated level and for different industrial sectors. The output of the knowledge production is the number patent...

The importance of capital structure is explored by comparing existing archetypes of financial systems through a new methodological application. Differences in firms’ cost of capital show that capital structure is relevant in R&D and other investment decisions. The conclusions are that 1) there...

The entrepreneur is an elusive character in economic theory due to the difficulty of providing an accurate description. It appears impossible to produce a single definition of entrepreneurship and most theoretical approaches yield operational difficulties. By the same token, most operational...

This paper attempts to explain knowledge production in Swedish functional regions as measured by the number of patent applications. Recognizing that technological opportunity differs across sectors, a sectoral analysis is conducted. The Knowledge Production Function (KPF) approach is applied in...