Nomadic firms in a globalizing economy: A comparative study

The location patterns of modern firms appear to exhibit floating patternswith a tendency towards footlooseness. The spatial-economic dynamics - sometimes across teh border - of firms is encapsulated in the term 'nomadic firms'. This paper adresses the issue of nomadic behaviour of firms against the background of globalisation trends. After a critical discussion of globalisation phenomena and a review of the literature on nomadic entrepreneurial behaviour, the paper sets out t formaulate a series of relevant hypotheses of spatial relocation behaviour of international firms in a globalizing network economy. The analytical framework is tested by means of interviews among actual or potential nomadic firms, in both the Netherlands and abroad. Infrastructure quality and geographical accessibility appear to play an important role, but also opportunity seeking behaviour has a prominent place in nomadic behaviour. The comparitive study among the various firms located in various countries, which aims to identify the critical relocation factors, is based on principles of modern meta-analysis.

Persistence of Regional Unemployment: Application of a Spatial Filtering Approach to Local Labour Markets in Germany

The geographical distribution and persistence of regional/local unemployment rates in heterogeneous economies (such as Germany) have been, in recent years, the subject of various theoretical and empirical studies. Several researchers have shown an interest in analysing the dynamic adjustment processes of unemployment and the average degree of dependence of the current unemployment rates or gross domestic product from the ones observed in the past. In this paper, we present a new econometric approach to the study of regional unemployment persistence, in order to account for spatial heterogeneity and/or spatial autocorrelation in both the levels and the dynamics of unemployment. First, we propose an econometric procedure suggesting the use of spatial filtering techniques as a substitute for fixed effects in a panel estimation framework. The spatial filter computed here is a proxy for spatially distributed region-specific information (e.g., the endowment of natural resources, or the size of the ‘home market’) that is usually incorporated in the fixed effects parameters. The advantages of our proposed procedure are that the spatial filter, by incorporating region-specific information that generates spatial autocorrelation, frees up degrees of freedom, simultaneously corrects for time-stable spatial autocorrelation in the residuals, and provides insights about the spatial patterns in regional adjustment processes. We present several experiments in order to investigate the spatial pattern of the heterogeneous autoregressive parameters estimated for unemployment data for German NUTS-3 regions. We find widely heterogeneous but generally high persistence in regional unemployment rates.