Unlike policy makers‟ belief that geographical proximity to incumbent exporters encourages non-exporters to start exporting through positive information externalities, the empirical evidence in early studies is mixed. To make a contribution to fill the gap, this paper reexamines the relationship between the spatial and industrial agglomeration of exporting firms and the probability of being an ...

Post-transitional labour markets of the Central and East European countries have been characterised by marked regional differences. This paper will concentrate on the spatial pattern of job creation, determined by the allocation decisions of foreign and domestic investors. Regions with the highest employment rates may boast high doses of FDI inflows, while low employment regions have been suffe...

This paper uses Chinese urban data to investigate two important issues regarding city size distribution: the nature in which cities of different size grow relative to each other, and which distribution is the best approximation of city size distribution. First, we examine how cities of different sizes grow relative to each other. While most empirical literatures suggest that relative size and r...

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence on the one hand and persistent or even increasing spatial concentration (agglomeration) on the other. Kernel density estimation, Markov chain analysis and...

We investigate the importance of market size as a determinant for industrial location patterns. In order to focus on a broad range of sectors, including services, both traded and non-traded goods are taken into consideration. In our model, traded goods industries always exhibit a ‘home market effect’ (HME), whereas the existence of such an effect for non-traded goods crucially hinges on the deg...

Unaffordable Housing and Local Employment Growth: Evidence from California Municipalities It is widely believed that unaffordable housing could drive businesses away and thus impede job growth. However, there is little evidence to support this view. This paper presents a simple model to clarify how housing affordability is linked to employment growth and why unaffordable housing could negativel...

We investigate whether the supply of venture capital (VC) is driven by spatial proximity between a VC company and the portfolio firm. Our analysis is based on information about VC investments in Germany between 2004 and 2009. We find that possible problems caused by the geographic distance to a portfolio firm seem to be overcome by syndication of investments with one of the VC firms located clo...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate vulnerability to financial contagion in a set of expanding emerging markets of the Middle East and North Africa, during seven episodes of international financial crisis. Using Fry & Baur (2005) fixed-effect panel approach, we significantly reject the hypothesis of a joint regional contagion. However, using a battery of bivariate contagion tests based ...

Economies of Scale in European Manufacturing Revisited* We test for internal and external economies of scale in European manufacturing, employing a more disaggregated data set than has been used in earlier analyses. We aim to separate externalities from common business cycle effects. Fifteen European manufacturing industries in France, Germany, Italy and the UK are analysed. We focus on economi...

This paper examines the exporting behaviour of Russian manufacturers by considering the interaction of firm characteristics and external conditions. An important distinction is made between general exporting activity and export to developed countries. Firm features and specific export experience are found to be important in determining the international orientation of manufacturers and the dest...