The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that emphasize the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

Dieser Aufsatz nutzt geheime Einzeldaten aus amtlichen Erhebungen in niedersächsischen Industriebetrieben, um einen Blick hinter die Kulissen des Exportbooms zu werfen. Hierbei zeigt sich eine ausgeprägte Heterogenität der Exportdynamik zwischen Betrieben innerhalb einer Hauptgruppe,...

Recent studies of border effects have focused on the intra-country and inter-country comparison of trade flows. It is found that borders have a negative impact on the size of cross-border trade. In order to estimate border effects on a regional level one needs not only data on inter-country but...

This paper uses a dataset on the foreign activities by Swedish manufacturing firms to examine the performance of German affiliates compared with affiliates in other locations. It is found that German affiliates, on average, have higher labour productivity, R&D expenditure per employee and...

In this paper we find evidence that the new economic geography approach is able to describe and explain the spatial characteristics of an economy, in our case the German economy. Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

In this paper we describe the development of regional specialisation and geographical concentration in Germany between 1993 and 2001. Somewhat contrary to theoretical expectations derived from the recent literature in location theory, we neither find compelling evidence for a specialisation...