Explaining the growth and change of regions and cities is one of the great challenges for social science. The field of economic geography and associated economics has developed frameworks in recent years that, while tackling major questions in spatial economic development, are deficient in their...

Research on entrepreneurship often uses information on self-employment to proxy for business creation and innovative behaviour. However, little evidence has been collected on the link between these measures. In this paper, we use data from the UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) combined with data from...

The striking geographical concentration of economic activities suggests that there are substantial benefits to agglomeration. However, the nature of those benefits remains unclear. In this paper we take advantage of a new dataset to quantify the role of one of the main contenders - the matching...

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE) theory, in which wages relate to employment density. The paper makes an...

Thomas Friedman (2005, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) argues that the expansion of trade, the internationalization of firms, the galloping process of outsourcing and the possibility of networking are creating a ‘flat...

Introducing equilibrium unemployment to the solution of the intertemporal allocation of non-leisure time, we derive two wage-setting models which we estimate by panel data and cross-section regressions applied on aggregative data. The results support the empirical relation known as the...

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high-order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by A. J. Fielding. It argues that occupational progression in such places particularly depends on concentrations both of...

In the urban resurgence accompanying the growth of the knowledge economy, second-order cities appear to be losing out to the principal city, especially where the latter is much larger and benefits from substantially greater agglomeration economies. The view that any city can make itself...

Ethnic inventors play important roles in US innovation systems, especially in high-tech regions like Silicon Valley. Do ‘ethnicity-innovation’ channels exist elsewhere? This paper investigates, using a new panel of UK patents microdata. In theory, ethnicity might affect positively innovation...

We use administrative data to estimate the effect of neighbourhood composition on teenagers’ educational and behavioural outcomes in England. We exploit a unique research design based on changes over time in neighbourhood composition experienced by residentially immobile students, where these...