An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf’s law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf’s law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this ‘law’ holds...

The geographical distribution and persistence of regional/local unemployment rates in heterogeneous economies (such as Germany) have been, in recent years, the subject of various theoretical and empirical studies. Several researchers have shown an interest in analysing the dynamic adjustment...

Regions, independent of their geographic level of aggregation, are known to be interrelated partly due to their relative locations. Similar economic performance among regions can be attributed to proximity. Consequently, a proper understanding, and accounting, of spatial liaisons is needed in...

The business performance of firms in the creative high-tech sector shows much variation. This paper examines whether the geographical location of such business firms influences the performance of these firms. The overarching analysis framework of this paper emerges from the recently developed...

This paper aims to investigate whether the spatial pattern of creative industries in the Netherlands has a relationship with the presence of cultural heritage or, in a more general sense, cultural capital. It first shows how the creative sector developed between 1994-2009 in relation to other...

We analyze a two-sector model of a trading creative regional economy (TCRE) of the sort studied by Florida. Our analysis focuses on two cases. The first (second) case concerns the impact of faster neutral (non-neutral) productivity growth in the tradable sector on the employment of creative...

Using a panel of 439 German regions we evaluate and compare the performance of various Neural Network (NN) models as forecasting tools for regional employment growth. Because of relevant differences in data availability between the former East and West Germany, the NN models are computed...

This paper offers an overview of experimental results, based on neural networks (NNs) used to forecast regional employment variations in Germany. NNs are statistical optimization tools inspired by the functioning of biological neural networks. Their main characteristics are their non-linear and...

Unemployment rates appear to vary widely at a subregional (e.g., local or provincial) level. Using spatial econometric models for spatial autocorrelation, this paper focuses attention on the spatial structure of regional unemployment disparities of Italian provinces. On the basis of findings...

In this introductory chapter, we contextualize and briefly describe the intellectual contributions of the different chapters in this book. Following this chapter, which comprises Part I of the book, there are eleven chapters and each of these chapters addresses a particular research question or...