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 this paper, a shift-share decomposition analysis of business change at plant-level is applied to Italian regions with reference to the period 2004-2009. In particular, a spatial version of shift-share analysis allows to look not only at the national, industrial mix and regional-shift...

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...

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...

The spatial concentration of firms has long been a central issue in economics under both the theoretical and the applied point of view mainly due to the important policy implications. A popular approach to its measurement, which does not suffer from the problem of the arbitrariness of the...

The study of the geographical distribution of firms and of the dynamic pattern of firm entry and firm exits is a particularly relevant issue in regional health economics especially in the view of policy intervention to geographically balance health service supply and demand. The current state of...

The main purpose of this Handbook is to provide overviews and assessments of the state-of-the-art regarding research methods, approaches and applications central to economic geography. The chapters are written by distinguished researchers from a variety of scholarly traditions and with a...

The potential offered by the increasing availability of micro-geographic data is tremendous and still largely not exploited. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to study the spatial dynamics of firm demography making use of such rich source of information. Exploiting the techniques of...