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on Economic Geography |
| By: | Carl Gaigné; Jacques-François Thisse |
| Abstract: | New economic geography (NEG) has proven to be very useful in dealing with a large number of issues. Yet, in this paper we do not discuss the canonical NEG models and their vast number of extensions. Rather, we provide an overview of recent developments in the NEG literature that build on the idea that the difference in the economic performance of regions is explained by the behavior and interactions between households and firms located within them. This means that we consider NEG models which take into account land markets, thereby the internal structure and industrial mix of urban agglomerations. |
| Keywords: | city size, city structure, firms location, households location |
| JEL: | R0 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rae:wpaper:201302&r=geo |
| By: | Charlotte Schlump (Philipps-Universität Marburg); Thomas Brenner (Philipps-Universität Marburg) |
| Abstract: | Cooperation in innovation processes has become crucial for the competitiveness of many firms. This paper focuses on technology-oriented East German firms and analyses details of their cooperation behaviour by studying the relationships between geographic and social proximity, the importance and frequency of cooperative interaction and the attributes of innovation cooperation partners that influence the importance of cooperation. Data is collected in two questionnaires and analysed by regressions. It is found, among other results, that cooperation that is established via personal contacts is, on average, more helpful and important for firms but involves less frequent interaction. |
| Keywords: | cooperation, firm, East Germany, policy |
| JEL: | D20 I28 O32 R11 |
| Date: | 2013–04–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pum:wpaper:2013-06&r=geo |
| By: | Luís Cabral; Zhu Wang; Daniel Yi Xu |
| Abstract: | Taking the early U.S. automobile industry as an example, we evaluate four competing hypotheses on regional industry agglomeration: intra-industry local externalities, inter-industry local externalities, employee spinouts, and location fixed-effects. Our findings suggest that inter-industry spillovers, particularly the development of the carriage and wagon industry, play an important role. Spinouts play a secondary role and only contribute to agglomeration at later stages of industry evolution. The presence of other firms in the same industry has a negligible (or maybe even negative) effect on agglomeration. Finally, location fixed-effects account for some agglomeration, though to a lesser extent than inter-industry spillovers and spinouts. |
| JEL: | L26 L6 R1 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18973&r=geo |
| By: | Kohei Nagamachi (Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo) |
| Abstract: | 　　 　　 Taking account of the increasing importance of task trade in urban contexts, this paper provides a model of a system of cities in which ex ante identical locations specialize in tasks that differ in their skill intensity, resulting in a unique size distribution of cities. The necessary and sufficient condition for a power law including Zipf's law is derived, and a quantitative analysis shows that the model is consistent with the size distribution of U.S. cities. A welfare analysis is also conducted, suggesting that the welfare loss due to spatial inefficiency is fairly small. |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tky:fseres:2013cf886&r=geo |
| By: | Forslid, Rikard (Dept. of Economics, Stockholm University); Okubo, Toshihiro (Kobe University) |
| Abstract: | This paper introduces scale economies or density economies in transportation in a trade and geography model with heterogeneous firms. This relatively small change to the standard model produces a new pattern of spatial sorting among …firms. Contrary to the existing literature, our model produces the result that firms of intermediate productivity relocate to the large core region, whereas high and low productivity firms remain in the periphery. Trade liberalisation leads to a gradual relocation to the core, with the most productive firms remaining in the periphery. |
| Keywords: | heterogeneous …firms; transportation costs; scale economies |
| JEL: | F12 F15 |
| Date: | 2013–04–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:sunrpe:2013_0009&r=geo |
| By: | Pierre-Philippe Combes (AMSE - Aix-Marseille School of Economics - Aix-Marseille Univ. - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [EHESS] - Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM)); Gilles Duranton (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania - University of Pennsylvania); Laurent Gobillon (INED - Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques Paris - INED, PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - CNRS : UMR8545 - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [EHESS] - Ecole des Ponts ParisTech - Ecole normale supérieure de Paris - ENS Paris - Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA), EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris) |
| Abstract: | We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French land price data. Our preferred estimate, which handles a number of estimation concerns, stands at 0.041. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent interest such as a distance gradient for land prices and the elasticity of unit land prices with respect to city population. For the latter, our preferred estimate is 0.72. |
| Keywords: | urban costs; land prices; land use; agglomeration |
| Date: | 2012–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-00793632&r=geo |
| By: | Martinho, Vítor João Pereira Domingues |
| Abstract: | The tourism in Portugal has been an important contribution to the economic development of the country, namely in zones where is difficult to implement others activities, specifically the manufacturing. The objective of this work is to analyze, for the period 2002-2011, with spatial econometric techniques (using the GeoDa informatics program), the statistic data, available in the Statistics Portugal (INE), of some variables related with the tourism in the NUTs III of Portugal Continental, namely: capacity (N.º) in accommodation establishments; capacity in accommodation establishments per 1000 inhabitants (N.º); nights (N.º) in accommodation establishments; nights in accommodation establishments per 100 inhabitants (N.º); accommodation establishments (N.º); average stay (N.º) in accommodation establishments; customers (N.º) in accommodation establishments; proportion of foreign customers (%); and net rate of bed occupancy (%) in accommodation establishments. The first, third, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth variables were further disaggregated for the several forms of accommodation establishments, as following: all accommodation establishments; hotels; pensions; guesthouses; inns; motels; hotels-apartments; holiday villages; and tourist apartments. The data was used in average and the econometric analyses were cross section. There are some signs of spatial autocorrelation in some variables and some forms of accommodation establishments. -- |
| Keywords: | Spatial econometrics,Tourism supply,Portuguese NUTs III |
| JEL: | C21 L83 O18 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:71762&r=geo |
| By: | Stéphanie LAVIGNE; Dalila NICET-CHENAF; Claude DUPUY |
| Abstract: | Our study examines the investment determinants of worldwide mutual funds from the perspective of economic geography. In particular, we investigate the preference of “impatient” mutual funds for specific countries. By analyzing a sample of 22,996 worldwide mutual funds over the period (2005-2009), we demonstrate that “impatient” mutual funds are favorable to large stock markets, markets with a high level of protection for shareholders, markets with familiar institutional practices and markets dominated by the presence of “strategic” investors as main shareholders of large listed companies. |
| Keywords: | geography of finance, mutual funds, “impatient” investors, portfolio turnover |
| JEL: | G11 G15 G20 P10 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grt:wpegrt:2013-12&r=geo |
| By: | Laure Latruffe; Laurent Piet |
| Abstract: | Agricultural land fragmentation is widespread around the world and may affect farmers’ decisions and therefore have an impact on the performance of farms, in either a negative or a positive way. We investigated this impact for the western region of Brittany, France, in 2007. To do so, we regressed a set of performance indicators on a set of fragmentation descriptors. The performance indicators (production costs, yields, revenue, profitability, technical and scale efficiency) were calculated at the farm level using Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) data, while the fragmentation descriptors were calculated at the municipality level using data from the cartographic field pattern registry (RPG). The various fragmentation descriptors enabled not only the traditional number and average size of plots, but also their scattering in the geographical space, to be taken into account. Our analysis highlights the fact that the measures of land fragmentation usually used in the literature do not reveal the whole set of significant relationships with farm performance and that, in particular, measures accounting for distance should be taken into consideration more systematically. |
| Keywords: | agricultural land fragmentation, farm performance, cartographic field pattern registry, France |
| JEL: | Q12 Q15 D24 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rae:wpaper:201304&r=geo |
| By: | Marie-Estelle Binet (CREM - Centre de Recherche en Economie et Management - CNRS : UMR6211 - Université de Rennes 1 - Université de Caen Basse-Normandie); François Facchini (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - CNRS : UMR8174 - Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne) |
| Abstract: | This article tackles one central issue in the regional science literature: the persistence of regional disparities in unemployment within national economies. Our approach is original as Okun's coefficients are estimated for each of the 22 administrative French regions over the period 1990-2008, taking into account cross-regional disparities in a panel data specification. Estimates show that the coefficients exhibit regional differences. Indeed, Okun's law is confirmed in fourteen regions, although it does not hold in the other eight regions. Finally, region-specific factors that explain the results that are not significant are identified, and policies to reduce unemployment in French regions are examined. |
| Keywords: | Okun's law, panel data, French regions, spatial heterogeneity |
| Date: | 2013–02–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00812549&r=geo |
| By: | Carolina Castaldi; Koen Frenken; Bart Los |
| Abstract: | We investigate how variety affects the innovation output of a region. Borrowing arguments from theories of recombinant innovation, we expect that related variety will enhance innovation as related technologies are more easily recombined into a new technology. However, we also expect that unrelated variety enhances technological breakthroughs, since radical innovation often stems from connecting previously unrelated technologies opening up whole new functionalities and applications. Using patent data for US states in the period 1977-1999 and associated citation data, we find evidence for both hypotheses. Our study thus sheds a new and critical light on the related-variety hypothesis in economic geography. |
| Keywords: | recombinant innovation, regional innovation, superstar patents, technological variety, evolutionary economic geography |
| JEL: | O31 R11 |
| Date: | 2013–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:tuecis:wpaper:1303&r=geo |
| By: | Arthur Vankan; Koen Frenken; Carolina Castaldi |
| Abstract: | Many studies have analysed the role of the creative class and cultural industries in fostering regional development. The focus on regional development neglects the individual differences in success among members in the creative class and among firms within cultural industries. We study firm founders in three design sectors (industrial design, graphic design and web design) and analyse the determinants of their personal income. Next to individual factors affecting income differences among designers, we look at the relational and spatial contexts in which designers operate. Hence, we can also assess whether spatial clustering and organisational networking are beneficial for designers. The main result, based on 200 telephonic questionnaires, holds that income is determined mainly by business experience and the use of advanced ICTs, while education and spatial clustering have no impact. We argue that policies in the design sector should be oriented towards helping young designers to gain experience as well as towards life-long learning in the use of ICTs. |
| Keywords: | creative class, cultural industries, design, spin-off, localisation economies, ICT |
| Date: | 2012–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:tuecis:wpaper:1205&r=geo |
| By: | Martinho, Vítor João Pereira Domingues |
| Abstract: | The tourism in the rural areas is an important contribution to the local economies and an additional income for the traditional local activities as the agricultural sector. Some traditional rural activities, as the agriculture, sometimes and in some locations are not sufficient to provide an acceptable return to their promoters. So the different forms of tourism in rural zones, as the small industry and others sectors, are important contributions to the economic activity in the rural areas. This study pretends to analyze some information and statistical data about the several forms of tourism in the Portuguese rural areas, namely tourism accommodation, rural tourism, agritourism, village tourism, country house and rural hotel. There were used data from 2004 to 2008 available in the Statistics of Portugal (INE) for the Portuguese NUTs II. These data were analyzed with econometric methods, namely, spatial econometrics and panel data analysis. -- |
| Keywords: | Tourism,Portugal,Rural areas,Econometric analysis |
| JEL: | O18 L83 C20 |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:71761&r=geo |
| By: | Francesco Caselli; Massimo Morelli; Dominic Rohner |
| Abstract: | We establish a theoretical as well as empirical framework to assess the role of resource endowments and their geographic location for inter-State conflict. The main predictions of the theory are that conflict tends to be more likely when at least one country has natural resources; when the resources in the resource-endowed country are closer to the border; and, in the case where both countries have natural resources, when the resources are located asymmetrically vis-a-vis the border. We test these predictions on a novel dataset featuring oilfield distances from bilateral borders. The empirical analysis shows that the presence and location of oil are significant and quantitatively important predictors of inter-State conflicts after WW2. |
| JEL: | Q34 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18978&r=geo |
| By: | Thomas Brenner (Philipps-Universität Marburg); Carsten Emmrich; Charlotte Schlump (Philipps-Universität Marburg) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines regional effects of the InnoRegio program, which was conducted by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The InnoRegio program has been a new tool of innovation policy with the aim to improve innovativeness in East Germany on the basis of prosperous regional networks. Besides the direct support of networks and innovation activities, the program was meant to trigger the regional development in East Germany. While existing studies examine whether the development of networks or cluster was successful, this paper focuses on the investigation of regional economic development. Using regional data, especially on employment and patents, we examine whether the involved industries have developed better in supported regions than in other (East) German regions. Developments are investigated for a time span including years before, during and after the policy measure. We find some positive effects in the regional development that can be assigned to the InnoRegio program. |
| Keywords: | cluster policy, InnoRegio program, cluster, networks, region, employment, innovation, policy evaluation |
| JEL: | C22 O12 O25 O33 R11 R28 |
| Date: | 2013–01–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pum:wpaper:2013-05&r=geo |
| By: | Ron Boschma; Gaston Heimeriks; Pierre-Alexandre Balland |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the impact of scientific relatedness on knowledge dynamics in biotech at the city level during the period 1989-2008. We assess the extent to which the emergence of new research topics and the disappearance of existing topics in cities are dependent on their degree of scientific relatedness with existing topics in those cities. We make use of the rise and fall of title words in scientific publications in biotech to identify major cognitive developments within the field. We determined the degree of relatedness between 1,028 scientific topics in biotech by means of co-occurrence of pairs of topics in journal articles. We combined this relatedness indicator between topics in biotech with the scientific portfolio of cities (i.e. the topics on which they published previously) to determine how cognitively close a potentially new topic (or an existing topic) is to the scientific portfolio of a city. We analyzed knowledge dynamics at the city level by looking at the entry and exit of topics in the scientific portfolio of 276 cities in the world. We found strong and robust evidence that new scientific topics in biotech tend to emerge systematically in cities where scientifically related topics already exist, while existing scientific topics had a higher probability to disappear from a city when these were weakly related to the scientific portfolio of the city. |
| Keywords: | relatedness, co-occurrence analysis, knowledge dynamics, geography of biotech, title words |
| JEL: | O33 R11 L65 D83 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:1304&r=geo |
| By: | Andrés Rodríguez-Pose; Viola von Berlepsch |
| Abstract: | Have Irish, German or Italian settlers arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century left an institutional trace which determines economic development differences to this day? Does the national origin of migrants matter for long-term development? This paper explores whether the distinct geographical settlement patterns of European migrants according to national origin affected economic development across US counties. It uses micro-data from the 1880 and 1910 censuses in order to identify where migrants from different nationalities settled and then regresses these patterns on current levels of economic development, using both OLS and instrumental variable approaches. The analysis controls for a number of factors which would have determined both the attractiveness of different US counties at the time of migration, as well as current levels of development. The results indicate that while there is a strong and positive impact associated with overall migration, the national origin of migrants does not make a difference for the current levels of economic development of US counties. |
| Keywords: | Migration, National/Ethnic Origin, Institutions, Culture, Economic Development, Counties, USA |
| JEL: | F22 O15 R23 N91 |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:1305&r=geo |
| By: | Clément Bosquet (AMSE - Aix-Marseille School of Economics - Aix-Marseille Univ. - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM), SERC - Spatial Economic Research Center - London School of Economics and Political Science); Pierre-Philippe Combes (AMSE - Aix-Marseille School of Economics - Aix-Marseille Univ. - Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM), CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research) |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of individual characteristics. The departments that generate most externalities are those where academics are homogeneous in terms of publication performance and have diverse research fields, and, to a lesser extent, large departments, with more women, older academics, star academics and foreign co-authors. Department specialisation in a field also favours publication in that field. More students per academic does not penalise publication. At the individual level, women and older academics publish less, while the average publication quality increases with average number of authors per paper, individual field diversity, number of published papers and foreign co-authors. |
| Keywords: | research productivity determinants; economic geography; networks; economics of science; selection and endogeneity |
| Date: | 2013–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00812490&r=geo |
| By: | Claire Bernard (EHESS, IRD, UMR DIAL); Sandrine Mesplé-Somps (DIAL, IRD, Paris); Gilles Spielvogel (UMR Développement et Société, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) |
| Abstract: | This paper uses exhaustive individual-level data from the Malian 1976, 1987 and 1998 censuses to analyze the urbanization process and economic specialization of cities in Mali. We first construct an exhaustive panel data set of the 10,000 Malian localities. In order to analyze urban areas that make sense from an economic point of view, we develop a consistent method to construct functional urban agglomerations, based on a density threshold for contiguous localities. Our definition of "cities" therefore abstracts from any administrative criteria. These data enable us to study the dynamics of the complete distribution of urban and rural localities from 1976 to 1998. We show that the urbanization process in Mali is mainly due to the spatial extension and population growth of Bamako, the capital city and to the demographic growth of small rural market towns. Consequently, the density of the Malian urban system is very low and urban primacy very high. We then turn to an econometric analysis of the determinants of non-agricultural employment growth between 1987 and 1998 by locality. We focus on two main factors: population density, which may induce agglomeration externalities that attract workers and firms; and the degree of specialization of economic activities that could capture industry level externalities. Controlling for a range of other characteristics like distance to the road network, administrative status, physical geography, and rainfall shocks, we show that total employment has been spreading out mainly due to the spreading out of primary employment. Primary sector dynamic is impacted by market access. Services and industry jobs cluster in cities and small towns, due mainly to public infrastructure amenities rather than urbanization externalities or sectoral externalities, the latter being not significant and the former significant but weak. _________________________________ A partir de données exhaustives des recensements maliens de la population de 1976, 1987 et 1998, cette étude analyse le processus d’urbanisation et de spécialisation économique des 10 000 localités maliennes. Grâce à un travail d’appariement minutieux, rarement entrepris même dans les pays développés, nous constituons un panel de l’ensemble des localités et nous définissons les agglomérations urbaines en fonction de leurs tailles, densités et contiguïtés. Nous montrons que le Mali est un pays où la concentration des populations s’est opérée prioritairement à Bamako et dans des petits bourgs ruraux et que son tissu urbain est très peu dense. La primatialité du système urbain est alors très élevée. L’analyse de la dynamique de l’emploi révèle que le processus d’urbanisation du Mali s’accompagne plutôt d’un processus de dispersion spatiale des emplois. Cependant, on observe que la croissance des emplois des branches secondaire et tertiaire au sein des villes et des bourgs ruraux de plus de 1 000 habitants dépend positivement de la taille des marchés. Les villes maliennes et leurs concentrations d’habitants permettent donc un dynamisme plus important de l’emploi dans les branches non agricoles. On observe que les zones d’expansion de la culture du coton sont les zones où la croissance démographique des localités est plus forte, sans pour autant que cela occasionne un dynamisme plus important de l’emploi non agricole. |
| Keywords: | urbanization, agglomeration, Mali,Secteur informel, marché du travail, Vietnam, crise financière internationale, politiques publiques. |
| JEL: | R11 R12 O18 O55 |
| Date: | 2012–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dia:wpaper:dt201217&r=geo |
| By: | Rehfeld, Dieter |
| Abstract: | Clusterpolitik ist die zentrale strukturpolitische Innovation der letzten 20 Jahre und mittlerweile tief im europäischen Mehrebenensystem verankert. Wie sich wirtschaftliche Strukturen verändern, muss sich auch Strukturpolitik ändern. Neue Strategien wie intelligente Spezialisierung und soziale Innovationen liefern Impulse, um Strukturpolitik weiter zu entwickeln. Gefragt ist ein umfassendes Innovationskonzept, dass auch den gesellschaftlichen Problemen Rechnung trägt. Hierbei geht es nicht um eine völlige Neuausrichtung, sondern um einen Lern- und Reflexionsprozess mit dem Ziel der Weiterentwicklung. -- |
| Date: | 2013 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iatfor:042013&r=geo |