We investigate firms’ incentives to locate in the same region to gain access to a large pool of skilled labor. Firms engage in risky R&D activities and thus create stochastic product and implied labor demand. Agglomeration in a cluster is more likely in situations where the innovation...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004We develop a general theoretical framework of trade on a platform on which buyers and sellers interact. The platform may be owned by a single large, or many small independent or vertically integrated intermediaries. We...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer — the seller — follows from a non–trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer–induced certification acts as an...