The complexity of the innovation process lies in dynamic networks among heterogeneous actors whose collaboration may end in patent co-ownership. Actors’ centrality in this network is a desirable feature for the innovator and a proxy of performance. We use this measure to assess the impact of three French policy reforms (1999, 2006-2007) that aimed at redefining the role of universities in the French research system. Precisely, we apply a Difference in Differences estimation strategy incorporating a propensity score matching to investigate the potential causal relationship between policy interventions and the evolution of French universities’ centrality, contrasting it with French public research organizations and German universities. Our results point to the increasing centrality gained by French universities in patenting co-ownership, after the policy interventions.

Understanding regional, sub-national, and developmental economic processes is of high political interest. There are different strands of economic theories of regional development, neoclassical theories, new growth as well as new trade theory, and theories of evolutionary economics, which can be divided by their respective conclusions. The recent advent of complexity economics, that is, applying complexity thinking to understand processes in the economy, changes the focus when studying phenomena such as regional development. One of these foci lies in the connectedness between entities of a system in networks through clusters and how macro outcomes emerge from their interactions. However, how the connectedness of regions through clusters in production networks influences regional development is unexplored. In this paper, statistically sound signals are derived from the share of trade within clusters to predict synchronization patterns of regional development between German counties. These results contribute to the economic literature on regional development by showing that the connectedness between regions through clusters can enhance the analysis of synchronized developmental patterns which is an aspect largely ignored by usual pairwise correlation analyses. This opens new perspectives on how to conceptualise regional development in order to adapt regional, national, and European policies. Another contribution of this paper extends beyond the scale of regional  development. This paper is motivated by concepts derived from understanding the economy as a complex system and thus, serves as a first step towards conceptualising a framework that studies regional development by means of complexity economics. Also, it can serve as a starting point to further study regional development and regional inequalities from a complex systems point of view. With whom you are connected helps to predict your developmental outcomes.

The Occupation Space is a weighted and directed network of occupations built from an extensive database that tracks French workers employment trajectories between 2003 and 2015. In this network, the links between occupations stands for the easiness to switch from one occupation to another that we interpret as being a good proxy for skill proximity between occupations. The article first describes the structural characteristics of the network. We show that some occupations offer workers important redeployment possibilities to other occupations. Then we use information on the centrality of occupations in the network to analyze its correlation with wage premium and unemployment duration. Our results show that the network-based index of centrality is informative of the sources of several labor market outcomes and inequalities.