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on Economic Geography |
| By: | Dunn , Richard A.; Babkin, Anton; Sandler, Austin; Curtis, Katherine; Adamson , Clayton; Peters, Sara |
| Abstract: | The economies of rural America continue to lag those in metropolitan areas with many experiencing significant hardship, but there is increasing agreement among researchers and policymakers that existing place typologies are inadequate for addressing urban-rural disparities. Because these typologies emphasize the urban end of the rural-urban continuum with rural treated as the undifferentiated residual category, the complex interaction of economic, demographic, and social factors that define rural places are ignored. To address this challenge, we have developed a data-driven approach to identify connections between places based on the spatial distribution of potential supply chain linkages to generate a new typology–Economic Catchment Areas (ECAs) thereby illuminating place-to-place connections obscured in existing place hierarchies. To do so, we construct county-to-county potential trade flows in intermediate inputs as the solution to a transportation distance loss function. Counties that would serve as the most important user of inputs for at least one other county are classified as destinations of an ECA, while all the counties for which the destination would be the largest user of their inputs are the sources of the ECA. For rural source counties, we then estimate the relationship between business, economic, demographic, and health outcomes in ECA destination counties and outcomes in their associated source counties. We find that these are positively related, highlighting the potential usefulness of the ECA framework for studying heterogeneity in economic and demographic outcomes among rural U.S. counties. |
| Keywords: | Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Relations/Trade |
| Date: | 2024–07–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea24:347606 |
| By: | Dunn , Richard A.; Babkin, Anton; Sandler, Austin; Curtis, Katherine; Adamson, Clayton; Peters, Sara |
| Abstract: | There is a nascent discussion among policymakers and researchers that rural areas may be disadvantaged by their location within the supply-chain as providers of raw and minimally processed inputs to centers of production located elsewhere. This paper makes several important contributions to this emerging policy discussion. First, we formalize a new concept of intermediate circularity that characterizes the production and trade of intermediates, i.e., goods and services that are transformed and combined to produce other goods and services. Second, we use this model to derive a collection of measures that quantify the shape of economic activity. Third, we calculate feasible versions of these measures by applying the input-output framework and we compare their distribution across metro and non-metro counties of the United States. Finally, we estimate the relationship between these measures of intermediate circularity and indicators of economic performance. We find that the distributions of intermediate circularity indicators differ across metro and non-metro counties, as do their correlations with economic growth. Intermediate inputs tend to account for a larger share of output in non-metro counties and are more intensively exported. These attributes are associated with lower growth in both metro and non-metro counties. On the other hand, while using intermediate inputs is associated with growth in non-metro counties, the opposite is true in metro counties. Implications for policymakers who might consider incentivizing the spatial reorganization of economic activity with the aim of increasing rural prosperity, reducing urban-rural inequality, or improving the resilience of rural economies are discussed. |
| Keywords: | Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Relations/Trade, Supply Chain |
| Date: | 2024–07–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea24:347605 |
| By: | Kremer, Anna |
| Abstract: | Meeting others with different backgrounds brings up new ideas. This paper shows that this not only matters for a background in heterogeneous industries or nationalities, but that regional differences matter too. Regions within a country vary in their traditions and culture. Cultural homogeneity within regions becomes mixed due to internal migration, which, like international migration, increases the diversity of a place. In a novel approach, I look at diversity in German municipalities, measured by different family names, and investigate its effect on the number of generated patents. I use a unique dataset from a 1996 phonebook and casualty lists from WWI. There is a positive association between innovation and diversity when defined by the share of new names, a deconcentration measure, or a Shannon index. Causality is established by using instrumental variables estimations with historical borders. I show that intra-country diversity affects patenting positively and conclude that regional differences matter for economic outcomes. |
| Keywords: | cultural diversity, innovation, family names, patents, local level, Germany |
| JEL: | R11 O30 Z13 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:tudcep:333401 |
| By: | Eran B. Hoffmann; Monika Piazzesi; Martin Schneider |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the connection between regional growth trends and labor market dynamics. New data on manufacturing worker flows for U.S. cities 1969-1981 show more new hires and more voluntary quits in growing cities, but more forced layoffs in shrinking cities. Recessions are special in growing cities in that hires and quits drop, whereas in shrinking cities layoffs rise. A quantitative business cycle model with migration and on-the-job search accounts for a large share of variation in growth and worker flows both over time and across space. Growing cities in the South and West had low job creation costs and only gradual in-migration, so tight labor markets encouraged more on-the-job search. In those cities, aggregate job destruction shocks generated recessions with lower labor market churn. In the shrinking cities of the Rust Belt, in contrast, churn was always low and responded little in recessions. |
| JEL: | E30 E32 J62 J63 J64 R11 R12 R13 |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34515 |
| By: | Peter Deffebach; David Lagakos; Yuhei Miyauchi; Eiji Yamada |
| Abstract: | We study how the spatial distribution of income and commuting patterns within cities vary across the development spectrum, drawing on new granular data from 50, 000 neighborhoods in 121 cities across developed and developing countries. We document that in developing countries, poorer urban households are significantly more likely to live far from city centers, in hilly terrain, and near rivers. These patterns are absent or reversed in developed cities. Commuting shares decline more sharply with distance in less developed countries, indicating higher commuting costs that exacerbate spatial inequality in job access. Job-access measures are considerably worse for the urban poor than for the urban rich in developing countries, while the opposite is true in developed countries. We interpret these findings in a quantitative urban model and show that a parsimonious set of factors—nonhomothetic preferences over amenities, commuting costs, and the spatial concentration of jobs—helps explain most of the cross-country patterns we document. |
| JEL: | O11 R12 |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34505 |
| By: | Aakash Bhalothia; Gavin Engelstad; Gaurav Khanna; Harrison Mitchell |
| Abstract: | We estimate the economic value of cities worldwide, using detailed job histories for 513 million workers in 220, 000 cities across 191 countries. These estimates allow us to identify why some cities are more productive than others and to quantify the earnings gains from migration throughout the development process. Our data contain job spells—with start and end dates, establishment names, locations, job titles, and effective salaries—enabling an event-study movers design with individual and time fixed effects. Moving to higher-value cities leads to immediate increases in job seniority, shifts into better-paid industries and occupations, and large overall earnings gains. The global scope of the data lets us compare internal and international moves and assess how the productivity advantages of cities differ by country income level. Across borders, 93% of wage changes reflect city effects, while within countries this share ranges from 45–73%. High-income countries exhibit stronger ability-based sorting, reducing the proportion attributable to place. City effects rise with industrial diversity and population, consistent with agglomeration economies, and more productive cities allocate workers to higher-productivity firms. The wide dispersion of city effects within countries highlights substantial potential gains from migration, particularly in low-income, less-urbanized economies. Reallocating workers to match the US distribution yields sizable wage gains in developing countries. |
| JEL: | J38 J6 O15 R12 R23 |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34503 |
| By: | Jorge A. Arroyo |
| Abstract: | I study how first sizable industry entries reshape local and neighboring labor markets in Puerto Rico. Using over a decade of quarterly municipality--industry data (2014Q1--2025Q1), I identify ``first sizable entries'' as large, persistent jumps in establishments, covered employment, and wage bill, and treat these as shocks to local industry presence at the municipio--industry level. Methodologically, I combine staggered-adoption difference-in-differences estimators that are robust to heterogeneous treatment timing with an imputation-based event-study approach, and I use a doubly robust difference-in-differences framework that explicitly allows for interference through pre-specified exposure mappings on a contiguity graph. The estimates show large and persistent direct gains in covered employment and wage bill in the treated municipality--industry cells over 0--16 quarters. Same-industry neighbors experience sizable short-run gains that reverse over the medium run, while within-municipality cross-industry and neighbor all-industries spillovers are small and imprecisely estimated. Once these spillovers are taken into account and spatially robust inference and sensitivity checks are applied, the net regional 0--16 quarter effect on covered employment is positive but modest in magnitude and estimated with considerable uncertainty. The results imply that first sizable entries generate substantial local gains where they occur, but much smaller and less precisely measured net employment gains for the broader regional economy, highlighting the importance of accounting for spatial spillovers when evaluating place-based policies. |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2511.19469 |
| By: | Freek Holvoet; Christopher Blier-Wong; Katrien Antonio |
| Abstract: | Incorporating spatial information, particularly those influenced by climate, weather, and demographic factors, is crucial for improving underwriting precision and enhancing risk management in insurance. However, spatial data are often unstructured, high-dimensional, and difficult to integrate into predictive models. Embedding methods are needed to convert spatial data into meaningful representations for modelling tasks. We propose a novel multi-view contrastive learning framework for generating spatial embeddings that combine information from multiple spatial data sources. To train the model, we construct a spatial dataset that merges satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap features across Europe. The framework aligns these spatial views with coordinate-based encodings, producing low-dimensional embeddings that capture both spatial structure and contextual similarity. Once trained, the model generates embeddings directly from latitude-longitude pairs, enabling any dataset with coordinates to be enriched with meaningful spatial features without requiring access to the original spatial inputs. In a case study on French real estate prices, we compare models trained on raw coordinates against those using our spatial embeddings as inputs. The embeddings consistently improve predictive accuracy across generalised linear, additive, and boosting models, while providing interpretable spatial effects and demonstrating transferability to unseen regions. |
| Date: | 2025–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2511.17954 |
| By: | Heriaud Bastien; Joossens Elisabeth (European Commission - JRC); Le Blanc Julia (European Commission - JRC) |
| Abstract: | "This report presents the Regional Resilience Dashboard (RRDB) as an analytical tool for assessing and monitoring resilience at the regional level within the European Union. Building on the Commission’s Resilience Dashboards (RDB), the RRDB provides a comprehensive overview of regional vulnerabilities and capacities across various dimensions, including economic, social, and environmental aspects, covering 242 NUTS2 regions.The primary objective of the dashboard is to support regions in conducting structured self-assessments and informing policy formulation, thereby enabling the identification of priority needs and strategic interventions to strengthen resilience. The report highlights the critical role of region-specific characteristics, such as geographic location in shaping regional resilience and provides evidence on how regional resilience has evolved over time." |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc141991 |
| By: | Paulo César Morceiro (South African Research Chair in Industrial Development (SARChI-ID), University of Johannesburg); Milene Simone Tessarin (Joint Research Centre, European Commission) |
| Abstract: | Apesar de o Brasil ser muito heterogêneo regionalmente e setorialmente, sua profunda desindustrialização é tradicionalmente avaliada para a indústria agregada ao nível nacional. Este estudo busca eliminar o descompasso entre onde a desindustrialização ocorre e onde ela é estudada ao investigar suas dimensões regionais e setoriais. Utilizamos de modo inédito séries homogêneas e longas de emprego para 25 setores e 27 regiões e empregamos o método de decomposição estrutural para avaliar a mudança estrutural nas últimas quatro décadas. Documentamos que a desindustrialização é altamente concentrada nos estados pioneiros da industrialização, que as indústrias tecnológicas foram negativamente afetadas e que a mudança estrutural foi maligna. Ademais, há heterogeneidades regionais e setoriais substantivas na evolução da (des)industrialização. Concluímos que a desindustrialização comprometeu a qualidade de vida das famílias ao afetar negativamente a remuneração dos trabalhadores e prejudicou os sistemas de inovação das regiões avançadas. Recomendamos que as políticas públicas sejam ajustadas às diferentes capacitações e portfólios produtivos regionais. |
| Keywords: | desenvolvimento regional; mudança estrutural; desenvolvimento industrial; desindustrialização; economia regional; emprego; economia brasileira; heterogeneidade regional; setores industriais; decomposi |
| JEL: | R11 O14 L6 J21 R12 L16 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:nereus:021815 |