Abstract
The theoretical and empirical innovation literature stresses the importance of regional factors and location conditions for location choice of firms and their innovation success. Innovation activities are not equally distributed in space because agglomeration effects and specific regional infrastructures may promote innovation activities. Concerning environmentally oriented innovations, the so-called eco-innovations, there is a widespread empirical literature analyzing their determinants but—because of the lack of adequate data—the inclusion of regional and location factors has been neglected. This paper tries to close this gap by using the establishment panel of the German Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg combined with data at the regional level. To explore specific regional determinants of eco-innovations compared to other innovations including variables at the firm and the regional level, a two-level mixed effects logistic regression has been applied. The econometric results show that external knowledge sources such as the regional proximity to research centers and universities are more important for eco-innovations compared to other innovations. Eco-innovations seem to be a chance for under-developed regions looking for new business activities because they are more likely in regions characterized by high poverty rates. Furthermore, they are less dependent on urbanization advantages. The econometric results also show that eco-innovations need a high qualification of the personnel connected with further education measures within the firms.
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Notes
For a more comprehensive overview of the determinants of eco-innovation see Horbach (2008). This paper focuses on the regional specificities of eco-innovations.
Therefore, due to these data restrictions it may be possible that not all of these firms are eco-innovators in the sense of our definition in Sect. 2.2.
The model uses the same estimator as a logit-random effects model for panel data. It is called a two-level model because instead of different point in times variables at the firm and regional level are considered. For a complete description of the model see STATA (2011:261).
Please note that the importance of regional factors for the innovation behavior of a firm may be low because, e.g., a firm may compensate a low human capital endowment of a region by attracting qualified employees from other regions. It may also be possible that the neighboring region is more important for the innovation behavior of a firm. Our NUTS 3 data does not allow controlling for these effects.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lutz Bellmann, Uwe Blien, Udo Brixy and Klara Kaufmann for very valuable support and discussions. Furthermore, I would like to thank three anonymous referees and participants of the 35th DRUID Conference 2013 in Barcelona, the 6th Summer Conference in Regional Science of the German Regional Science Association in Dortmund, the 2013 annual conference of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Düsseldorf and of a workshop of the University of Ferrara in September 2013.
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Appendix: Table 6
Appendix: Table 6
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Horbach, J. Do eco-innovations need specific regional characteristics? An econometric analysis for Germany. Rev Reg Res 34, 23–38 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10037-013-0079-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10037-013-0079-4