This article studies path dependent regional structural change using a quantitative framework. Based on an inter-relatedness indicator, the degree to which local skill-bases exist and force local economies onto a path-dependent development trajectory is studied. The main question is into which...

Who introduces structural change in regional economies: Entrepreneurs or existing firms? And do local or non-local firms and entrepreneurs create most novelty in a region? Using matched employer-employee data for the whole Swedish workforce, we determine how unrelated and therefore how novel the...

Cities vary with regard to the characteristics of their economic life. A formal model by Duranton and Puga (2001) suggests a division of labour between diversified and specialized cities. Diversified cities (the “nursery cities”) provide a fertile environment for search and innovation....

In this paper we measure technological relatedness between industries using a dataset on product portfolios of plants. For this purpose we first develop a general methodology to extract data on co-occurrences of classes (e.g. industries) in a single entity (e.g. a plant) to construct estimates...

The question of how new regional growth paths emerge has been raised by many leading economic geographers. From an evolutionary perspective, there are strong reasons to believe that regions are most likely to branch into industries that are technologically related to the preexisting industries...

In this paper, the changing roles of agglomeration externalities during different stages of the industry life cycle are investigated. A central argument is that agglomeration externalities vary with mode of competition, innovation intensity, and characteristics of learning opportunities in...

The literature in economic geography has recently shown a growing interest in the path dependent transformation of regional economies. According to evolutionary accounts, the development of regional economies can be regarded as a result of technological branching processes, where the development...

We investigate the extent to which a local industry is affected by an overrepresentation of related industries in the local economy. We focus on two types of inter-industry relatedness, namely, the degree to which two industries can employ a similarly skilled labor force and the degree to which...

We study localization, urbanization, and Jacobs' externality effects on plant survival inSweden (1970-2004). We focus on two questions: (1) do agglomeration externalities changewith the age of plants? (2) using new information about the relatedness among industries,what is the role of...