This paper documents a significant impact of climate variation on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily in arid countries. By lowering farm incomes, reduced moisture availability encourages migration to nearby cities, while wetter conditions slow it. The paper also provides evidence for ruralurban linkages. In countries where cities are starting to develop an industrial base, reduced mo...

The paper seeks to develop our understanding of the somewhat diffuse nature of technological externalities in technological space by associating a geographical dimension with the sectoral dimension. Using panel data this paper estimates a knowledge production function that allows for spillovers inside the same industry and outside, and for local as well as global geographical spillovers. This a...

The drivers of educational attainment have been the subject of much research both in the developed and the developing world. Yet, nothing is known about the effect of birth registration on schooling outcomes. Birth registration is not only a fundamental human right but also a requirement to obtain additional documents of legal identity and access many government benefits. Using data for the Dom...

This paper has two goals. First, to provide an accurate characterisation of the new small firm in Scotland by reference to markets, finance, costs, business strategy, human capital, internal organisation and technical change. Second, to use these same features to discover salient differences between small firms which either survive or close, two or three years after inception. The empirical evi...

Using administrative data from firms in Australia that conduct research and development (R&D), we examine how R&D activity of other firms and public institutions affect a firm’s own R&D expenditure. We distinguish between the impact of peers, suppliers and clients. We examine whether geographical proximity and industrial clustering affect R&D spillovers. Overall, we detect positive effects on R...

The modifiable areal unit problems (MAUP) is a problem by which aggregated units of data influence the results of spatial data analysis. Standard GWR, which ignores aggregation mechanisms, cannot be considered to serve as an efficient countermeasure of MAUP. Accordingly, this study proposes a type of GWR with aggregation mechanisms, termed area-to-point (ATP) GWR herein. ATP GWR, which is close...

Two new problems of bivalent propositional logic are proposed here: firstly, to distinguish the sense of propositions, besides the logical value and secondly, to analyze the ”ponderal” difference between two parts of a proposition: subject-predicate. 1 Relational projections and extensions Let r = (A1, A2, A3, R) be a ternary relation (see [3]). Starting with this, we may define three binary re...

This paper compares the geographic “reach” of knowledge flows from university inventions through two important channels: market contracts (licenses) and non–market “spillovers” exemplified by patent citations. We find that knowledge flows through market transactions to be more geographically localized than those operating through non–market spillovers. Moreover, the differential effects of dist...

We document that the Bay Area rose from 4% of all successful US patent applications in 1976 to 16% in 2008. This is partly driven by the increase in the prevalence of information and communication technology; however, even for patents unrelated to information and communication technology, we see a disproportionate increase in the share of all US patents from the Bay Area. We interpret this to s...