This paper looks at spatial and sectoral effects on firm entry and exit in Italian NUTS-3 regions, over the period 2004-2009. We use a new version of spatial shift-share decomposition which looks more effectively at the neighbourhood influence, beyond traditionally looking at national,...

The paper proposes a novel methodology to assess the role of “location” in shaping firm growth. Along with traditional determinants (e.g., age, size and financial constraints), geographical location is alleged to drive firm growth. The...

The presence of knowledge spillovers and shared human capital is at the heart of the Marhall-Arrow- Romer externalities hypothesis. Most of the earlier empirical contributions on knowledge externalities, however, considered data aggregated at a regional level so that conclusions are based on the...

In recent years, spatial sampling has been the subject of a flourishing literature. Its use had become widespread due to the availability of topographical information about statistical units, especially in the environmental context. New algorithms enable us to take advantage of spatial locations...

In this paper we examine the existence of destination, industry, and generic export spillovers at the regional level. The empirical analysis is conducted by examining data on export activity of 103 Italian NUTS 3 regions, the 10 industries with the highest export values in the period...

Maximum likelihood estimation of spatial models based on weight matrices typically requires a sizeable computational capacity, even in rel- atively small samples. The unilateral approximation approach to spatial models estimation has been suggested in Besag (1974) as a viable alternat- ive to...