According to New Economic Geography models, the limited diffusion of knowledge through space is a key determinant of the location decision of innovative activities. Following the dynamic externality approach presented by Glaeser et al. (1992), many recent econometric studies attempt to evaluate...

New Economic Geography presents increasing returns to agglomeration as the central explanation behind the concentration of economic activity. Within this framework, returns to scale are caused by a preference for variety in consumption which is better satisfied by agglomeration. The estimation...

Global change has become eminent in our everyday lives. Slowly, but noticeably, the faces surrounding us represent the international global community. Climate doomsday is as present as ethnical and religious controversy. The press reports how eastern German women to flee the catastrophic...

Revised from November 2006 and July 2007. We consider fixed-effect estimation of a production function where inputs and outputs vary over time, space, and cross-sectional unit. Variability in the spatial dimension allows for time-varying individual effects, without parametric assumptions on the...

The paper applies spatial econometric techniques to measure the impact of airport noise on the price of single-family homes in the Zurich Airport area. We exploit a large database of geo-referenced noise measurements to investigate the reaction of prices to different noise metrics. The...

We design a conceptual framework for linking two approaches: the literature on absorptive capacity and the literature on spatial knowledge spillovers. Regions produce new knowledge, but only part of it is efficiently adopted in the economy; the share of efficiently adopted technology depends on...

Recent theoretical advances have emphasised the importance of localised increasing returns to scale in understanding both the regional growth and agglomeration processes. However, considerable empirical controversy still exists over whether returns to scale are constant or increasing....

For a long time social sciences scholars from different fields have devoted their attention to identifying the causes leading to commit criminal offences and recently lots of studies have included the analysis of spatial effects. Respect to the Italian crime phenomenon some stylized facts exist:...

Recent research in international economics highlights the role of interdependencies of investment decisions and sales of multinational firms. Previous work focused on and provided evidence for aggregate flows or stocks of foreign direct investment, showing that interdependence declines in...

The hospital competition literature demonstrates that estimates of the effect of local market structure on competition are sensitive to geographic market definition. Our spatial lag approach effects smoothing of the explanatory variables across the discrete market boundaries. This approach...