Large shocks, such as natural disasters, are often found to have little or no effect on the equilibrium distribution of economic activity across space. Two apparently competing theoretical explanations for this phenomenon are the increasing returns theory and the locational fundamentals theory....

Structural funds are the most intensively used policy instrument by the European Union to promote economic growth in its member states and to speed up the process of convergence. This paper empirically explores the effectiveness of European Structural Funds by means of a panel data analysis for...

In recent years, a large number of studies investigated the spatial distribution of economic activities in Western Europe by means of various measures of geographical concentration. The fundamental problem with the indices currently used in the literature is that they do not take explicitly into...

The empirical economic growth literature is criticized for its lack of robustness. For different definitions of robustness, conclusions vary from ?almost every correlation is fragile? to ?a substantial number of explanatory variables are robust.? We re-analyze the empirical results of the...

The intensity of international transactions remains lower than could be potentially justified on the basis of transportation costs alone. This has become known as the ?mystery of the missing trade?. Transaction costs may be responsible for ?under-trading? across national borders. More...

Shift-share is a popular, relatively easy to apply, tool in spatial analysis. Upon its initial development and use in the 1970s the literature has shown that serious drawbacks of the shift-share technique should be noted (e.g., lack of theoretical basis, sensitivity to level of aggregation). But...

The purpose of this article is to explore the determinants of the implicit price of the risk of flooding. We carry out a meta-analysis on estimates resulting from the application of hedonic price models. The variable under scrutiny is the relative change in the price of a house located in a...

The issue whether ‘jobs follow people’ and/or ‘people follow jobs’ has recently emerged as one of the leading themes in regional and urban science. Much of the interest herein stems from alleged inconsistencies in the empirical evidence, which naturally raises questions as for the...