|
on Economic Geography |
| By: | Joshua Drucker |
| Abstract: | In a seminal article, Benjamin Chinitz (1961) raises the question of the effects that industry size, structure, and economic diversification may have on firm performance and regional economies. His line of inquiry suggests a related but conceptually distinct issue: how does the extent to which a industry is regionally dominated—concentrated locally in a single or small number of firms—impact the local performance of that industry? This question has received little attention, principally because accurately measuring industrial concentration at the regional scale requires firm-level information. This paper makes use of confidential plant- and firm-level manufacturing data to explore patterns of industrial concentration in the United States at the regional scale. Regional analogues of concentration ratios and other measures commonly used in the aspatial industrial organization literature indicate the extent to which manufacturing activity is concentrated in a small number of firms. Both the manufacturing sector as a whole and major manufacturing industry sectors are examined in order to determine the extent of industrial concentration in the continental United States, to explore changes over time in geographic patterns of concentration, and to investigate associations between industrial concentration and employment growth at the regional scale. Implications for understanding regional growth and for devising regional economic development policy are discussed. |
| Date: | 2009–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:09-06&r=geo |
| By: | Aldashev, Alisher |
| Abstract: | The paper analyzes effects of occupational and regional mobility on the matching rate using the monthly panel disaggregated on regional and occupational level. The main contribution of the paper is measuring the effect of substitutability between vacancies for different occupations and vacancies in different regions on matchings. The estimates indicate higher regional mobility in West Germany but higher occupational mobility in East Germany. The results show that if occupations were perfect substitutes, the number of matches could increase by 5-9%. Perfect regional mobility could increase matchings by 5-15%. It is also shown that partial aggregation causes a downward bias in substitutability estimates. |
| Keywords: | Matching function,constant elasticity of substitution,spatial correlation,occupational and regional mobility,nonlinear least squares,GMM |
| JEL: | J62 J63 R23 J61 |
| Date: | 2009 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:09014&r=geo |
| By: | Hyun-Ju Koh (University of Munich); Nadine Riedel (Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation) |
| Abstract: | This paper assesses the agglomeration pattern of four-digit industries in Germany using a rich data set on the population of German firms. To identify geographical agglomeration, we follow the distance based approach of Duranton and Overman (2005) and find that the location pattern of 78% of our industries departs from randomness in the sense that firms exhibit significant geographical localization. In line with previous studies on manufacturing firms in the UK and France, our analysis suggests that especially traditional manufacturing industries exhibit strong localization patterns. Moreover, we find that geographical localization is not restricted to the manufacturing sector but that it plays an equally, or even more important role in service industries. |
| Keywords: | Geographic concentration, agglomeration |
| JEL: | R12 |
| Date: | 2009 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:btx:wpaper:0913&r=geo |
| By: | Perekhozhuk, Oleksandr; Grings, Michael; Glauben, Thomas |
| Abstract: | Most of the studies based on the New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) approach use the industry data to estimate the degree of market power at the national level. Yet, only a few empirical studies presented the results that measure the degree of market power at the regional level and found the existence of market power in the regional markets. While the fact is that there is an extensive evidence for the existence of potential oligopsony market power in the Ukrainian milk processing industry (price cartels and geographic market sharing among milk processing enterprises, interference of the state authorities, higher concentration on regional markets), the estimation results of the market structure model at the national level did not produce any evidence suggesting the exercise of oligopsony power (the estimated parameter of oligopsony power is close to zero and statistically insignificant). The objective of this study is to estimate the degree of oligopsony power in the regional market for raw milk. The estimation results of the market structure model at the regional level indicate the existence of oligopsony power in nine out of the twenty three regions of Ukraine. |
| Keywords: | New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO); Oligopsony Power; Ukraine; |
| JEL: | L11 L13 |
| Date: | 2009–06–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:16991&r=geo |
| By: | Judith Hellerstein; Melissa McInerney; David Neumark |
| Abstract: | Employment rates of Hispanic males in the United States are considerably lower than employment rates of whites. In the data used in this paper, the Hispanic male employment rate is 61 percent, compared with 83 percent for white men.1 The question of the employment disadvantage of Hispanic men likely has many parallels to the question of the employment disadvantage of black men, where factors including spatial mismatch, discrimination, and labor market networks have all received attention as contributing factors. However, the Hispanic disadvantage has been much less studied, and the goal of this paper is to bridge that gap. To that end, we present evidence that tries to assess which of the three factors listed above appears to contribute to the lower employment rate of Hispanic males. We focus in particular on immigrant Hispanics and Hispanics who do not speak English well. |
| Date: | 2009–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:09-03&r=geo |
| By: | Lucas Davis |
| Abstract: | Current trends in electricity consumption imply that hundreds of new fossil-fuel power plants will be built in the United States over the next several decades. Power plant siting has become increasingly contentious, in part because power plants are a source of numerous negative local externalities including elevated levels of air pollution, haze, noise and traffic. Policymakers attempt to take these local disamenities into account when siting facilities, but little reliable evidence is available about their quantitative importance. This paper examines neighborhoods in the United States where power plants were opened during the 1990s using household-level data from a restricted version of the U.S. decennial census. Compared to neighborhoods farther away, housing values and rents decreased by 3-5% between 1990 and 2000 in neighborhoods near sites. Estimates of household marginal willingness-to-pay to avoid power plants are reported separately for natural gas and other types of plants, large plants and small plants, base load plants and peaker plants, and upwind and downwind households. |
| Keywords: | Power Plants, Siting, Local Air Quality, Housing Markets |
| JEL: | D62 D63 H23 Q51 |
| Date: | 2008–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:08-19&r=geo |
| By: | Randal Verbrugge (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) |
| Abstract: | This paper demonstrates that, in the context of U.S. housing data, rents and ex ante user costs diverge markedly—in both growth rates and levels—for extended periods of time, a seeming failure of arbitrage and a puzzle from the perspective of standard capital theory. The tremendous volatility of even appropriately-smoothed ex ante annual user cost measures implies that such measures are unsuitable for inclusion in official price statistics. The divergence holds not only at the aggregate level, but at the metropolitan-market level as well, and is robust across different house price and rent measures. But transactions costs matter: the large persistent divergences did not imply the presence of unexploited profit opportunities. In particular, even though detached housing is readily moved between owner and renter markets, and the detached-unit rental market is surprisingly thick, transactions costs would have prevented risk-neutral investors from earning expected profits by buying a property to rent out for a year, and would have prevented risk-neutral homeowners from earning expected profits by selling their homes and becoming renters for a year. Finally, computing implied appreciation as a residual yields a house price forecast with huge errors; but either longer-horizon or no-real-capital-gains forecasts— which turn out to have similar forecast errors—imply a far less divergent user cost measure which might ultimately be useful for official price statistics. Some conjectures are offered. |
| Keywords: | user costs; arbitrage; transactions costs; house price appreciation; forecasting; inflation stickiness; rental equivalence; CPI |
| JEL: | R31 R21 E31 C81 C82 O47 |
| Date: | 2009–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bls:wpaper:ec080080&r=geo |
| By: | Custódia Bastos (Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal); Suzi Ladeira (Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal); Sofia Silva (Faculdade de Economia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal) |
| Abstract: | Culture and art are emerging as the principal components of the creative industries raising their attractiveness in urban centers. Economics apparently does not have a direct connection with culture and art. However, a closer look into de reality shows that economics and arts are intrinsically related with arts benefiting from a more entrepreneurial and economic led perspectives. The proposed study details the intimate connection which is established between arts and economics by empirically analyzing the vibrant creativity cluster of Miguel Bombarda Street (MBS), situated at the centre of Porto city. This insightful and informative case further provides a pertinent account on the role of entrepreneurship in arts. Through a combination of in depth interviews to key actors and a comprehensive survey to all the firms and art galleries of MBS, the study highlights and details the emergence of MBS cluster and the reasons and players responsible for such emergence and development. Finally, based on the results we evaluate and discuss MBS cluster sustainability and how this type of projects might contribute for the renewal and boost the Porto city. |
| Keywords: | indústrias criativas; artes; clusters; empreendedorismo |
| Date: | 2009–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:por:fepwps:331&r=geo |
| By: | Judith Hellerstein; Melissa McInerney; David Neumark |
| Abstract: | We specify and implement a test for the importance of network effects in determining the establishments at which people work, using recently-constructed matched employer-employee data at the establishment level. We explicitly measure the importance of network effects for groups broken out by race, ethnicity, and various measures of skill, for networks generated by residential proximity. The evidence indicates that labor market networks play an important role in hiring, more so for minorities and the less-skilled, especially among Hispanics, and that labor market networks appear to be race-based. |
| Date: | 2009–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:09-01&r=geo |
| By: | Squicciarini, Mariagrazia |
| Abstract: | The paper focuses on the role of Science Parks (SPs) as seedbeds of innovation. It investigates whether and to what extent locating inside a science park relates to the innovative output of tenant firms. The simple assessment methodology proposed relies on count data models, uses patents as innovation performance indicators, and exploits original data regarding the Finnish science parks, their main characteristics, and the data of 252 SP tenant firms, including their patenting activity over the period 19702002. Among other results, the study suggests that both within and among SPs interaction and spillover effects exist, and points out the way in which they relate to firms' innovative output. Results are robust to controlling for the existence of innovation lags. Parks' first mover disadvantages also emerge, as well as non-negligible matching phenomena whereby firms' and parks' characteristics matter jointly. |
| Keywords: | Science Parks,knowledge spillovers,innovation,patents,firm performance |
| JEL: | L29 O32 O38 |
| Date: | 2009 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:200932&r=geo |