The role of radical innovations for the economy has received increasing attention by German policy‐makers. This paper investigates how (un‐)related variety and external linkages influence these innovations in German labour market regions. Evidence is found that related and unrelated knowledge capabilities both support the emergence of radical innovations, although strong related capabilities are especially important. External linkages have an inverted u‐shape relation to radically new ideas and can act as substitute for missing unrelated competences in a region. The results shed new light on the emergence of radical innovations and thus have interesting scientific and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
This paper applies Verdoorn's and Okun's law to derive efficient estimates of the employment and unemployment threshold in the Unified Germany. The analysis is built on a disaggregated dataset of regional labour markets, where spatial dependencies are taken into account. Especially, a spatial SUR model is proposed utilising the eigenfunction decomposition approach suggested by Griffith (1996, 2000 ). The thresholds turn out to be unstable over time. However, minimum output growth sufficient for a rise in employment is below the level needed for a drop in the unemployment rate. If spatial effects are ignored, the thresholds seem to be markedly overrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
We investigate whether economic functional regions capture spatial clustering of core economic indicators better than administrative regions. For this purpose, we use hierarchical linear models to measure the degree of homogenization of different regional delineations. Our results for Germany show that economic functional regions tend to capture spatial clustering better than administrative ones. However, a considerable amount of clustering at a lower aggregation level cannot be accounted for by economic functional regions, especially around metropolitan centres. Furthermore, economic functional regions, which depict commuting interrelations well, are less able to capture spatial homogenization than other economic functional delineations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]