Abstract
A growing body of work emphasizes the importance of regional factors for regional innovativeness. In this paper, about 70 variables approximating the social-economic characteristics of regions are aggregated to 12 regional factors. In four industry-specific set-ups their influence on firms’ innovativeness is tested. The study confirms that inter-industrial differences exist in the importance of these factors. In the empirical analyses a log-linear model is compared with a linear approach. While both are theoretically problematic it is shown that the log-linear model performs better in the empirical assessment.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Broekel, T., Brenner, T. Regional factors and innovativeness: an empirical analysis of four German industries. Ann Reg Sci 47, 169–194 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-009-0364-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-009-0364-x
Keywords
- Regional innovation performance
- Regional innovativeness
- Knowledge production function
- Industry comparison
- German regions