Urban Gråsjö

A Monte Carlo simulation study of Tobit models

This study focuses on a comparison of different kinds of Tobit models. According to the findings, a simple Tobit I method can produce results that are similar to and in some cases better than much more sophisticated methods. This is especially true if the participation or index equation is incorrectly specified.

Accessibility to R&D and Patent Production

The main purpose in this paper is to study to what extent accessibility to R&D can explain patent production. Therefore a knowledge production function is estimated both on aggregated level and for different industrial sectors. The output of the knowledge production is the number patent applications in Swedish municipalities from 1994 to 1999. In order to account for the importance of proximity, the explanatory variables are expressed as accessibilities to university and company R&D. The total accessibility is then decomposed into local, intra-regional and inter-regional accessibility to R&D. As often is the case with R&D outputs, the regional distribution of patents is highly skewed with influential outliers. The estimations are therefore conducted with quantile regressions. The main results on aggregated level indicate that high accessibility (local) to company R&D has the greatest positive effects on patent production. The effects are statistically significant for municipalities with a patent production corresponding to the median and to quantiles above the median. Local accessibility to university R&D is only of importance for certain industrial sectors and not on aggregated level. There is also evidence that intra-regional accessibility to company R&D affects patent production positively. A conclusion is that concentrated R&D investments in companies situated in municipalities with a high patenting activity would not only gain the municipalities themselves, but also the patent production in other municipalities in the functional region.

Knowledge Flows, Knowledge Externalities, and Regional Economic Development

New knowledge generated by an economic agent in a region will tend over time to flow to other economic agents in the same region but also to economic agents in other regions. It is quite common in the literature to use the concept of knowledge spillovers for such knowledge flows, irrespective of whether they are intended or non-intended. The potential for intra-regional knowledge spillover effects depends on the volume and character of the generation on new knowledge in each region as well as of the general characteristics of the individual regional economic milieu, i.e., those location attributes, which are regionally trapped and which include how well integrated it is with other regions. The larger this potential, the higher the probability that firms dependent upon knowledge spillovers will locate there and the higher probability that entrepreneurs will take advantage of this potential to launch innovations and to create new knowledge-based firms. To the extent that firms and entrepreneurs can enjoy these knowledge spillovers, they represent an externality or more specifically a knowledge externality in the regional economy. Great importance is in the literature attributed to knowledge spillovers and knowledge externalities as drivers of regional economic development. Some authors, for example, claim that regional variations in localised knowledge spillovers are one of the main reasons behind regional variations in innovation performance. Against this background, the purpose of this chapter is, based upon a general characterization of knowledge flows, to analyse the character of knowledge externalities and, in par-ticular, their sources, their economic nature, their recipients, their mechanisms and channels, their geographic reach, and their economic consequences generally and for regional economic development in particular.

University and Industry R&D Accessibility and Regional Growth

University and Industry R&D Accessibility and Regional Growth A shortcoming of traditional endogenous growth approaches is their assumption that the stock of knowledge is generally accessible across space. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the contribution of R&D to economic growth in Swedish municipalities, taking account of the variation in R&D accessibility among different municipalities. We argue that the interaction possibilities at different spatial scales can be properly represented by an accessibility approach which discounts interaction potentials using travel time distances. The main result of the analysis is that knowledge accessibility in a given period has a statistically significant effect on the growth in value-added per employee in subsequent periods. Furthermore, the knowledge resources in a given municipality tend to have a positive effect on the growth of another municipality, conditional on the municipalities belonging to the same functional region. Keywords: nowledge, economic growth, accessibility, regional, spillovers JEL classification codes: R110, O520, O300, O400

University-educated Labor, R&D and Regional Export Performance

The main purpose of the study in this paper is to establish to what extent accessibility to R&D and university-educated labor can explain regional export performance. This is done by estimating knowledge production functions, with total export value and number of high-valued exports in Swedish municipalities from 1997 to 1999 as outputs. The results in the paper indicate that accessibility to university-educated labor has the greatest positive effects. The value of exported products is mainly affected by local accessibility to university-educated labor (and company R&D). The intra- and inter-regional accessibilities play a more important role when the number of high-valued export products in Swedish municipalities is the output.

Accessibility: an underused analytical and empirical tool in spatial economics

Accessibility has for many years been a widely used tool in transportation research. Many definitions have been suggested and researchers have constructed numerous mathematical formulations to measure its value in order to be able to evaluate the relationships between the nature of the transport systems and the patterns of land use. Such correlations have been used especially in assessing existing transport systems and forecasting their performance to provide decision-makers with ideas about the need for investments in the transport systems. However, accessibility measures can be regarded as the spatial counterparts of discounting. The measures represent the spatial distribution of economic agents and their activities in a simple way that imposes a very clear structure upon the relationship between these agents and their activities and their environment. Various frictional effects arising from geographical distance between economic agents determine their interaction options, that is, their options to trade, to cooperate, to learn, to commute, and so on. Observing that the time sensitivities of the economic agents vary between different spatial scales (and between different economic activities) we may impose a spatial structure (for example, local, intra-regional, interregional and international) which offers opportunities to define variables in such a way that spatial dependencies can be accommodated. These newly defined variables can then be used in empirical explanations of various spatial phenomena, such as patent output, new firm formation, the emergence of new export products, and economic growth in different spatial units. We will in this chapter against this background show that accessibility is an underused analytical and empirical tool in regional science with an underestimated potential.

Spatial knowledge spillovers in Europe : A Meta-Analysis

One of the most important economic events in recent decades has been the ongoing process of European integration. This book provides a basic yet rigorous understanding of the current issues and problems of economic integration and innovation in Europe, and argues that national or regional economic development depends mainly on technical change, social and human capital, and knowledge creation and diffusion. This is clearly evident in the role of the quadruple innovation helix of government, university, industry and civil society.In this paper we quantitatively review the empirical literature on spatial knowl¬edge spillovers in Europe by means of meta-analysis to determine the extent to which such spillovers have been empirically documented as well as the spatial reach of these spillovers. In addition, we will apply meta-regression analysis to analyze the determinants of observed heterogeneity across and between publications. To our knowledge this is the first study of its kind. Our results show that if total local R&D expenditure in a European region increases by 1%, then the number of patents in that region, on average, increases by about 0.5%. Spatial knowledge spillovers induce a positive effect on local knowledge production, however, this effect proves to be small around 0.07%. Spatial weighting regime seems to matter. If R&D expenditures in other regions are weighted by distance in kilometers or minutes (instead of a binary contiguity matrix) then the spillover effect on average will be larger. Also, public R&D expenditure is found to have a lower impact on local patent production compared to the private R&D expenditure.

Different measures of economic growth lead to different conclusions

Economic growth is defined as the percentage output increase in an economy, e.g. a nation, a region or a municipality. The economic growth is closely related to the industrial structure, health, demography and income distribution of the economy. The most used measure for national economic growth is the change in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP measures the value added of all goods and services produced in the economy. The production of goods and services generates primary incomes for households and another method of measuring GDP is therefore to add up all incomes. One part of this income consists of the sum of all wages paid to households. When regional growth studies are conducted, a common measure of economic growth is the wage sum. One reason for this may be the limited access to GDP data on regional level. However, in Sweden there exists GDP data on municipal level, which enables studies where the effects of using GDP data or wage data can be compared. The aim of the present study is to investigate the difference the use of the measures GMP (Gross Municipal Growth) and the sum of wages has on growth models. Since the two measures are similar but not identical the choice of measure of growth can influence the conclusions of an investigation. This might lead to contradictory results on for instance how the access to university research influences the economical growth (Andersson, GrasjA¶ & Karlsson 2007, 2008). Preliminary results indicate high positive correlations between changes in GMP and wage sum on municipal level. However, when data on GMP per capita and wage sum per capita are used, the correlations are still positive but much smaller. References Andersson M., GrasjA¶ U. & Karlsson C. (2007), Regional Growth and Accessibility to Knowledge Resources: A Study of Swedish Municipalities, The ICFAI Journal of Knowledge Management, July 07 Andersson M., GrasjA¶ U. & Karlsson C., (2008), Human Capital and Productivity in a Spatial Economic System, Annals of Economics and Statistics, No 87/88 - 2008.

Employment and economic activity in different Swedish border regions: Implications for Regions and Industries

This study investigate how the effect of cross border activities between Sweden and its three Nordic neighbours influence the Swedish local economies along the border using municipal data from 2009. Two measures for the local economies are examined, economic activity (measured by gross pay per inhabitant) and employment rates. The Swedish border regions where divided into four regions: The Swedish border to Finland, The Swedish border to the part of Norway not included in the Oslo labour market, The Swedish border to the Oslo labour market, and the Swedish-Danish border region. The regression models show how the the regions compare to the Swedish average when controlled for market structure and accessibility to population. For Swedens border regions to Denmark and the Oslo labour market there are significant improvements in both economic activity and employment rates when the border activity is included. The improvement is highest for the Oslo border regions. For the Swedish border to Finland and to the part of Norway not included inte the Olso labour market the border activity has no significant influence on either economic activity or employment rates.

Indicators of economic development – an exploratory study using Swedish municipal data contrasting economic development and growth

This paper explores different definitions of Economic Development and possible measures for Economic Development and how they relate to measures commonly used for studying Economic Growth. The data ...