Séminaire GREDEG: Silvia ROCCHETTA (DCU Business School)

Silvia Rocchetta is an Assistant Professor of Economics in DCU Business School. 
Dr Rocchetta was working for the past two years on European Research Council project on technology evolution in regional economies in the Spatial Dynamics Lab at University College Dublin.  She received her PhD in Economics from Università degli studi di Torino – Collegio Carlo Alberto.  During her doctoral studies, she was a Visiting researcher in the Centre for Business Research of the University of Cambridge. Her thesis mainly focused on the links between innovation and resilience using different units of analysis: firm and region.  Her current projects mainly focus on the regional knowledge space evolution, adaptive resilience, technological change, industry lifecycle, innovation and inequality.  Her research is currently under revision for publications in well-known evolutionary economic geography journals.​

Title: Technological diversification and the growth of regions in the short and long run

Abstract : We study the effects of different types of technological diversification on the performance of regional economies. We focus on the relatedness and unconventionality of technological capabilities as drivers of GDP and employment growth. Using economic indicators from Eurostat regional statistics and patent records from the European Patent Office (EPO) PATSTAT and the OECD RegPat databases, we estimate Panel Vector Autoregression models and generate Impulse Response Functions to assess to what extent and with what persistence relatedness and unconventionality affect growth. Our findings, which have implications for place-based innovation policies, reveal that technological relatedness has short-term effects on employment growth and negative effects on GDP growth, whereas technological unconventionality has a long-lasting positive impact on GDP growth and no effect on employment growth.