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on Economic Geography |
| By: | Dauth, Wolfgang (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]); Fuchs, Michaela (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]); Otto, Anne (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany]) |
| Abstract: | "This paper analyzes the evolution of geographical concentration in the West German manufacturing, service, and knowledge-intensive sectors over a time period of 30 years. Drawing on detailed plant data of 187 industries from 1980 to 2010, we observe substantial concentration that is highest in manufacturing. Over time, there is a trend of deconcentration encompassing all economic activity. These patterns remain stable when accounting for both various sectoral and regional levels of aggregation and spatial dependencies between neighbouring regions. Investigating the role of plant births, expansions, contractions, and closures for the decline of concentration, we show that the underlying mechanisms differ across sectors. The dispersion of manufacturing industries is driven by contracting and closing plants within industrial agglomerations, whereas the dispersion of the service sector is fostered by the creation of new plants outside industrial agglomerations." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)) |
| Date: | 2015–09–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iab:iabdpa:201527&r=all |
| By: | Partridge, Mark; Dan S., Rickman; Olfert, M. Rose; Tan, Ying |
| Abstract: | Despite the attention given to international trade in discussion of the economic struggles of many U.S. regions, it is unclear whether international trade shocks impact local economies more, or differently than shocks originating within the domestic economy. A challenge in making this discernment is separating trade shocks from common or domestic shocks. Therefore, using U.S. county-level data for 1990-2010, this study carefully constructs shocks to local economies, isolating those arising from international imports and exports to assess whether trade shocks have different effects from domestic shocks. In confirmatory analysis, we also employ a novel combination of IV and matching strategies. We examine a variety of indicators including employment growth, population growth, employment rates, wage rates and poverty rates. The results suggest that international trade shocks have some different effects than overall domestic shocks, though likely less than commonly perceived. We also find that domestic shocks dominate international trade shocks in explaining variation in regional labor market outcomes. |
| Keywords: | International trade; regional growth; labor markets; shocks; population growth; poverty rates, wage rates |
| JEL: | F16 J21 J3 |
| Date: | 2014–05–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:66892&r=all |
| By: | Glaeser, Edward L; Ponzetto, Giacomo AM; Zou, Yimei |
| Abstract: | Should China build mega-cities or a network of linked middle-sized metropolises? Can Europe's mid-sized cities compete with global agglomeration by forging stronger inter-urban links? This paper examines these questions within a model of recombinant growth and endogenous local amenities. Three primary factors determine the trade-off between networks and big cities: local returns to scale in innovation, the elasticity of housing supply, and the importance of local amenities. Even if there are global increasing returns, the returns to local scale in innovation may be decreasing, and that makes networks more appealing than mega-cities. Inelastic housing supply makes it harder to supply more space in dense confines, which perhaps explains why networks are more popular in regulated Europe than in the American Sunbelt. Larger cities can dominate networks because of amenities, as long as the benefits of scale overwhelm the downsides of density. In our framework, the skilled are more likely to prefer mega-cities than the less skilled, and the long-run benefits of either mega-cities or networks may be quite different from the short-run benefits. |
| Keywords: | cities; growth; migration; networks |
| JEL: | F15 O18 R10 R58 |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10816&r=all |
| By: | Jordi Jofre-Monseny (Universitat de Barcelona & IEB); Maria Sánchez-Vidal (London School of Economics); Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal (Universitat de Barcelona & IEB) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyses the effects of large manufacturing plant closures on local employment. Specifically, we estimate the net employment effects of the closure of 45 large manufacturing plants in Spain, which relocated abroad between 2001 and 2006. We run differences-in-differences specifications in which locations that experience a closure are matched to locations with similar pre-treatment employment levels and trends. The results show that when a plant closes, for each job directly lost in the plant closure, between 0.3 and 0.6 jobs are actually lost in the local economy. The adjustment is concentrated in incumbent firms in the industry that suffered the closure, providing indirect evidence of labor market pooling effects. We find no employment effects in the rest of manufacturing industries or in the services sectors. These findings suggest that traditional input-output analyses tend to overstate the net employment losses of large plant closures. |
| Keywords: | Local employment, plant closures, input-output, agglomeration economies |
| JEL: | R12 R23 R58 J23 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2015-19&r=all |
| By: | Metaxas, Theodore; Duquenne, Marie Noelle |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the importance of territorial characteristics on small and medium-sized firms’ (SMEs) competitiveness. The analysis is based on primary data collected through questionnaires from 374 firms located in Bari (Italy), Varna (Bulgaria) and Thessaloniki (Greece). These firms operate in the sectors of industry, commerce and services. Through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), the contribution of a large set of territorial characteristics has been assessed allowing us to extract some important and comprehensive factors for firms’ competitiveness. Finally we implemented a multinomial logistic regression (MLR) in which the degree of firms’ competitiveness (Low, Medium, High) is specified as a function of the territorial components identified through EFA. Three categories of firms’ competitiveness are examined: competitiveness at national level, competitiveness against South-Eastern firms as well as North-Western firms. The MLR has been applied to all firms as well as to each one of the three sectors of activity. The results of the analysis confirm that the contribution of each major territorial component is largely conditioned by the type of competitiveness examined as well as the sector of activity. |
| Keywords: | Firms’ competitiveness, Territorial characteristics, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Multinomial Logistic Regression |
| JEL: | O18 R11 R58 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:66848&r=all |
| By: | Yao Amber Li (Department of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Institute for Emerging Market Studies, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology); Keith Head (Sander School of Business, University of British Columbia); Asier Minondo |
| Abstract: | Using data on academic citations, career and educational histories of mathematicians, and disaggregated distance data for the world's top 1000 math departments, we study how geography and ties affect knowledge flows among scholars. The ties we consider are coauthorship, past colocation, advisor-mediated relationships, and alma mater relationships (holding a Ph.D. from the institution where another scholar is affiliated). Logit regressions using fixed effects that control for subject similarity, article quality, and temporal lags, show linkages are strongly associated with citation. Controlling for ties generally halves the negative impact of geographic barriers on citations; the distance effect became insignificant after 2004. |
| Keywords: | network, distance, border, geography, knowledge flows, academic citations, genealogy, matching |
| JEL: | O3 F1 R1 |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hku:wpaper:201530&r=all |
| By: | Berliant, Marcus; Watanabe, Hiroki |
| Abstract: | Zipf’s law is one of the best-known empirical regularities in urban economics. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination of an asymmetric transport network. In a scale-free network, the chance of observing extremes in network connections becomes higher than the Gaussian distribution predicts and therefore it explains the emergence of large clusters. The city-size distribution shares the same pattern. This paper decodes how accessibility of a city to other cities on the transportation network can boost its local economy and explains the city-size distribution as a result of its underlying transportation network structure. Finally, we discuss the endogenous evolution of transport networks. |
| Keywords: | Zipf’s law; city-size distribution; scale-free network |
| JEL: | L14 R12 R40 |
| Date: | 2015–09–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:66802&r=all |
| By: | Miquel-Ángel Garcia-López (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona & IEB); Camille Hémet (Universitat de Barcelona & IEB); Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal (Universitat de Barcelona & IEB) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the influence of transportation infrastructure, and in particular of the Regional Express Rail (RER), on employment and population growth in the Paris metropolitan area between 1968 and 2010. In order to make proper causal inference, we rely on historical instruments and control for all other transportation modes that could be complement or substitute to the RER. A dynamic analysis accounting for spatial heterogeneity reveals that for municipalities located less than 13 kilometers from an RER station, each kilometer closer to the station increases employment and population growth by 12% and 8% respectively. Regarding the time pattern of these effects, we find no impact of the RER expansion on employment growth during the first part of the period, while the effect on population growth appears earlier but declines over time. |
| Keywords: | Urban growth, urban spatial structure, transportation |
| JEL: | R11 R12 R42 L91 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2015-20&r=all |
| By: | Marcos Ki Hyung Lee; André Luis Squarize Chagas |
| Abstract: | Este presente trabalho tem como objetivo estudar os efeitos que as faixas exclusivas de ônibus possuem no preço de imóveis na cidade de São Paulo, entre os anos de 2011 e 2014. Nos últimos anos, têm-se intensificado a implantação desse tipo de política, e é importante analisar seus impactos objetivamente. A literatura teórica e empírica corrobora a tese de que políticas desse tipo tem impacto positivo nos preços. No entanto, esses estudos são escassos no Brasil e a aplicação de econometria espacial e dados longitudinais é recente. Utilizando diversos tipos de modelos e metodologias de maneira a se garantir a robustez dos resultados, a conclusão é que os as faixas de ônibus tiveram impacto positivo na cidade, e que a preocupação com os efeitos espaciais é importante e possuí efeitos relevantes. |
| Keywords: | bus lanes; spatial econometrics; panel data |
| JEL: | C23 H41 R14 R38 R48 |
| Date: | 2015–09–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spa:wpaper:2015wpecon21&r=all |
| By: | Claire Dujardin (IWEPS); Virginie Louis (iweps); Florian Mayneris (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)) |
| Abstract: | Cet article étudie l’impact de la politique wallonne des pôles de compétitivité sur les performances économiques des entreprises financées. Sont considérés en particulier les effets sur la productivité, l’emploi et les exportations. L’analyse se base sur des micro-données d’entreprises couvrant l’ensemble des entreprises wallonnes et bruxelloises, pour la période 2003-2011. Nous recourons à des doubles et triples différences et à des méthodes de matching afin de solutionner les biais de sélection et de simultanéité. Les résultats suggèrent que, si la politique a bien sélectionné des entreprises plus performantes, elle n’aurait eu d’impact significatif ni sur la productivité, ni sur la valeur des exportations des entreprises bénéficiaires. Par contre, l’entrée dans le dispositif des pôles coïnciderait avec une légère augmentation de l’emploi des entreprises financées, ainsi qu’avec une diversification de leur portefeuille de produits exportés. This paper analyzes the impact of the Walloon competitiveness clusters policy on the economic performances of firms. We study more particularly the impact on productivity, employment and exports. We use firm-level panel data for all firms in Wallonia and the Brussels-Capital Region, for the period 2003-2011. We use double and triple differences and matching techniques to address selection and simultaneity issues. Results suggest that the policy selected firms that were initially more productive and larger in terms of employment. It seems however that the policy had no effect on productivity, nor on the value of exports. However, their entry into clusters seems to coincide with a slight increase in the number of employees, as well as with an increase in the number of exported products. |
| Keywords: | Clusters, productivité, emploi, exportations, évaluation, Clusters, productivity, employment, exports, evaluation |
| JEL: | C23 R10 R11 R58 |
| Date: | 2015–09–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2015017&r=all |