While there have been some references in the literature to the potential role of the general decline in rainfall in sub-Saharan African nations on their poor growth performance relative to other developing countries, this avenue remains empirically unexplored. In this paper we use a new...

This paper analyses and compares the dynamics of agglomeration in Portuguese and Irish manufacturing industries between 1985 and 1998 implementing Dumais, Ellison and Glaeser (2002)'s methodology. Using comparable and exhaustive micro-level data sets, we find that industries tend to be subject...

We measure the effect of R&D spillovers on plant productivity by taking account of (i) the national origin of the spillovers, (ii) the mechanism through which spillovers may flow (FDI and/or imports), (iii) the sectoral scope of spillovers, as well as (iv) their geographic scope, in a single...

We investigate the role that climatic change has played in the pattern of urbanization in sub-Saharan countries compared to the rest of the developing world. To this end we assemble a cross-country panel data set that allows us to estimate the determinants of urbanization. The results of our...

We study the coagglomeration of domestic plants and foreign multinationals and the impact of this on domestic plant productivity and employment using data for Irish manufacturing. Relying on a recently developed index we find that coagglomeration has been important for a number of industries....

We investigate the existence of local (i.e. within-country) and global (i.e. between-country) knowledge spillovers within a single analytical framework. Our analysis is based on an exhaustive database on Irish manufacturing plants covering the period 1986-1994 and focuses on the impact of R&D...