“…Simultaneously, an important number of empirical papers have implemented these methodological developments. Papers by Rey and Montouri (1999), Egger and Pfaffermayr (2004), Le Gallo and Dall'erba (2006), Lundberg (2006), Fingleton (2007), Moscone, Tosetti, and Knapp (2007), Le Gallo and Chasco (2008), Lauridsen, Bech, López, and Maté (2010), Kakamu et al (2012), Cotteleer and Van Kooten (2012), He, Páez, Liu, and Jiang (2015), Izón, Hand, Mccollum, Thacher, and Berrens (2016), López, Martínez-Ortiz, and Cegarra-Navarro (2017), Franklin and Rey (2016), Tupy, Silva, Amaral, and Cavalcante (2021), and Páez, López, Menezes, Cavalcanti, and Pitta (2021) are well-known examples in this line.…”