A growing body of work emphasizes the importance of regional factors for regional innovativeness. In this paper, about 70 variables approximating the social-economic characteristics of regions are aggregated to 12 regional factors. In four industry-specific set-ups their influence on firms...

Local industrial clusters have attracted much attention in the recenteconomic and geographical literature. A huge number of case studies have beenconducted. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the case studies of 159 localindustrial clusters in various countries and industries. Based on an...

A stochastic model of the evolution of the firm population in a regionand industry is developed. This model is used to make predictions about theexpected probability distribution of the firm number in regions and their dynamics.Data on the spatial distribution of firms in Germany is used to...

This paper studies the frequency of observing a certain number offirms or employees in a region for a given industry. Various predictions for thesefrequencies are deduced from theoretical considerations. Then, the empirical distri-butions of 198 industries in Germany are analysed. It is found...

This paper analyzes how the qualitative change in human labor occurs in mutualdependence with the advancement of the epistemic base of technology. Historically, arecurrent pattern can be identified: humans learned to successively transfer laborqualities to machines. The subsequent release of...

In economics simulation models are used quite a lot to carry out mathematical experiments.However, the specification of the parameter set with which to run these simulations is, ingeneral, quite an adventure into the unknown. Criticism is easily found with the procedure, asit is difficult to...

This paper discusses several features of knowledge that are often considered crucial for characterizing the economic significance of knowledge: whether it is overtly accessible or tacit, whether it can be or is encoded or not, and whether it has public or private good character. It is argued...