Human capital is observed to be an important contributor to growth but unevenly distributed geographically. While there is consensus on the importance of human capital to economic development, debate takes shape around two central issues. First, there is the question of how best to measure human...

This paper uses an institutional approach to investigate the relationship between the regional institutional environment and regional new firm formation. The importance of perceived attitudes regarding private enterprises, local taxes, political majority, the size of the government sector and...

The rapid developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the increased use of ICT motivate the vision of an evolving digital economy. During the last decade this evolving digital economy has been the pre-eminent driver of structural change and economic growth at both the...

The relationship between start-up rates and regional economic development has been studied rather extensively in recent years. Dynamics in start-up rates have however received considerably less attention. In this paper we analyze the persistence of start-up rates across Swedish regions over a...

Past research on the effects of agglomeration externalities on regional economic development is inconclusive and has focused mainly on employment growth and innovative output. This paper considers the link between agglomeration externalities and entrepreneurship. It does so by looking at the...

The returns to education have been thoroughly investigated and Sweden has shown to have a relatively low return compared to other countries in Europe. Nevertheless, few studies have combined the regional perspective with returns to education. Hence, the purpose of the paper is to analyze...

It is argued that the introduction of new technology is leading toward the decentralization of the production and consumption of creative products and industries. But creative industries and workers may benefit from being around large markets, access to shared labor, network interactions and...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between knowledge accessibility and regional economic growth in Sweden. The research question we ask in this paper is the following: can the variation between regions in knowledge accessibility in a given period explain the variation in the growth...

The objective of this paper is to empirically examine the importance of the structure of agglomeration on productivity and growth. To accomplish this we will include the degree of co-agglomeration of similar industries as an explanatory variable in the empirical analysis, while simultaneously...

In smaller countries, the non-metropolitan regions are to a substantial degree linked together with the metropolitan regions through various networks. The national infrastructure and transport networks are often organised with the metropolitan region as the central hub. This creates a number of...