The question whether agglomeration effects are of importance for regional development has a long tradition in regional science. This paper asks if regional characteristics and specifically ag-glomeration effects influence the performance of plants in Germany and, if so, in which direction....

We consider education as a number of multistage creative processes and analyse one of them - teaching knowledge (process P1) - in detail. In part 1 we describe the idea of Virtual Production Line (VPL), introduced by Walukiewicz in 2006 as an extension of Classical Production Line (CPL), an...

The aim of the paper is to test the Benhabib and Spiegel (2005) productivity (TFP) catch-up framework on European regions. Differences in the stock of human capital across regions are hypothesized to be the cause of differences in the speed by which follower regions converge and catch-up with...

Dairy production has long been the most important production line in Finnish and Norwegian agriculture. Prior to Finland joining the EU, farm structure as well as national agricultural policy was very similar in the two countries. In this paper, we explore development and differences in...

Increased productivity is one of the main drivers of economic growth. Considering the increasing importance of the service sector in many economies studies of productivity in service firms are essential, but still rare. Questions concerning the underlying reasons for productivity differences in...

This paper attempts to analyze the impact of knowledge and knowledge spillovers on regional total factor productivity (TFP) in Europe. Regional patent stocks are used as a proxy for knowledge, and TFP is measured in terms of a superlative index. We follow Fischer et. al (2008) by using a...

The present work assess the effects of MAR and Jacob's type agglomeration economies on a sample of firms in the machineries and textiles industries in Greece for the periods 1989-91 and 1999-01. The analysis employs a stochastic production frontier function and allows agglomeration economies to...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the determinants of off-farm labor supply by heads of household and their spouses in Nicaragua. Using a three-year balanced panel dataset, we refine the approach introduced by Jacoby (1993) and Skoufias (1994) to estimate shadow wages and shadow income,...

This paper is an attempt to explain variations across EU regions in productivity growth and takes into consideration the important structure of the age-productivity relation of Human Capital. The study is fundamentally based on the theory of Fingleton's model which analyses the spatial process...