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This paper analyses the patterns of firm growth of manufacturing firms across Portuguese regions. In particular, we compare firm size and growth in order to investigate 1) whether region-specific characteristics, interpreted as generating localization economies, exert any influence on firm growth and size, and 2) whether there is evidence of persistence in firm growth across regions. Using an extensive dataset of Portuguese manufacturing firms and applying parametric and semi-parametric approaches, we found that, in eleven of the eighteen analyzed regions, firm growth is related to firm size and therefore firms have no equal probabilities of attaining a particular growth rate within any given period. Moreover, the results uncovered that firms experience serial correlation in their growth patterns in all regions and region-specific characteristics, such as industrial diversity, entrepreneurship potential, and workforce qualities, engender differences in the way firms grow. Thus, this paper adds to the literature by showing how geographic location matters to firm size and growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the urban world population grows steadily, cities have become the main habitat for human beings. Against this backdrop, city quality or the level of development of the city's habitat that ensures the satisfaction of objective and subjective human needs become a matter of growing interest and concern for academics, policy makers, and citizens. Building on a resource‐based view of city quality, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it proposes and validates scales for six city sub‐habitats: political, economic, social, natural, artificial, and technological. Second, it tests a model and the underlying hypothesis about the ranking of those sub‐habitats and of the perceived controversy regarding decision making upon them. For those purposes, a survey of 768 city inhabitants was conducted in Portugal to measure city quality and their sub‐habitats. Both the predicted ranking of importance of the sub‐habitats and the perceived ranking of controversy were empirically validated. The results constitute a novel and important contribution to understand city quality and its sub‐habitats, whose conceptual power relies on hierarchized factors linked to citizens' happiness and to the level of controversy of the solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the geographical distribution and concentration of firms' innovation persistence and innovation type (product and process) based on three waves of the Portuguese Community Innovation Survey data covering the period 1998-2006. The main findings are: 1) both innovation persistence and innovation type are asymmetrically distributed across Portuguese regions, 2) the degree of correlation between geographical location and innovative output varies with the innovation type, and 3) the correlation between geographical unit and innovation increases when the spatial unit of analysis is narrower. The results suggest that the firms' choices of geographical location have a long-lasting effect, engendering no equal probabilities of being persistently innovative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the worldwide trend of urbanisation, data reveal that some cities are growing whereas others are losing inhabitants. To assess such dynamics in Portuguese cities, demographic, employment, housing, and climate variables were analysed as possible drivers of population change for the period 1991-2011. Panel data models show that higher shares of employment in the secondary and tertiary sectors, higher maximum temperatures, and a higher proportion of middle-aged vacant houses act as pull factors attracting inhabitants, whereas a higher unemployment rate is a push factor for cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]