European Regional Science Association
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European Regional Science Association
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The abstract for paper number 21:
Heidi Cigan, HWWA Hamburg Institute of International Economics, Hamburg, Germany
In the Weightless Economy, Does Firm Location Matter?
Technological progress in the area of information and communication technologies means that a growing proportion of economic activity is based on the input/output of intangible created assets, or knowledge, rather than material resources. Correspondingly, this part of the economy is sometimes referred to as the Weightless Economy. Against this background, this paper analyses the question: does location matter for firms in the Weightless Economy? In doing so, we draw hypotheses about the location of Weightless Economy firms from economic theory and analyse the existing empirical evidence. The main result is that location does matter for firms in the Weightless Economy, to a large extent due to the importance of locally limited knowledge spillovers but also due to other 'hard' and 'soft' location factors.
Unfortunately full paper has not been submitted.