Growth and Change最新文献

The shale boom of the early 21st century turned the U.S. into an energy powerhouse and significantly disrupted local economies with shale resources. This study examines the impacts of the U.S. shale boom on regional patenting at a commuting zone level. The shale boom may negatively affect patents if it crowds out labor and capital investments in other non-energy industries. Our findings show that a one standard deviation increase in non-vertical well density decreases patent intensity by 3.74% of the mean. Areas with higher drilling densities have lower levels of patented innovation compared to their counterfactuals. This paper contributes to the existing literature related to the “natural resource curse.” We provide new evidence based on regional patenting, which is an important indicator for regional innovation and long-term economic growth.

In the last decade, many studies discussed the impact of intangible investment on firms' performance. However, comparing the effect of different types of intangible investments at regional and sectoral level is not well explored. The paper aims to fill this gap by assessing the impact of several intangible capital on labor productivity using for the first-time updated data for the period 2000–2019. Adopting panel data techniques and system GMM, the results show that regions with higher endowments of intangible capital get higher levels of labor productivity. The study results also highlight the importance of differentiating between different sectors and types of intangible capital as they have different impact on productivity labor. In the primary sector only investments in R&D result in additional productivity gains. In the manufacturing industry, investments in R&D and software result in additional productivity gains while the service sector also increases labor productivity through other intangibles assets with innovative property such as mineral exploration, entertainment, and artistic originals.

Schmidt, V., Zen, A. C., Fernandes, B. S., & Bittencourt, B. A. (2023). Trajectory and cluster resilience elements: The case of the Brazilian wine cluster of the Serra Gaúcha. Growth and Change, 54(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/grow.12666

“How to cite this article: Schmidt, V. K., Zen, A. C., Soares, B. F., & Bittencourt, B. A. (2023). Trajectory and cluster resilience elements: The case of the Brazilian wine cluster of the Serra Gaúcha. Growth and Change, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/grow.12666” should be “How to cite this article: Schmidt, V. K., Zen, A. C., Fernandes, B. S., & Bittencourt, B. A. (2023). Trajectory and cluster resilience elements: The case of the Brazilian wine cluster of the Serra Gaúcha. Growth and Change, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/grow.12666.”

We apologize for this error.

Contrary to the existing literature that suggests the inhibitory or facilitating effect of housing prices on entrepreneurial dynamism, this paper explores the nonlinear effect of housing prices on entrepreneurship and countervailing effect of entrepreneurial dynamism on housing prices, in addition to investigating the spatial interaction between the two. This paper constructs a simultaneous equation model (SEM) to empirically test the interaction and spillover effects between housing prices and entrepreneurial dynamism. The results show that: (1) there is a two-way interaction between housing prices and entrepreneurial dynamism; (2) the estimated coefficients of housing prices and the quadratic square term of housing prices (14.285 and −0.744, respectively) are consistent and significant as expected, indicating an inverted U-shaped effect of housing prices on entrepreneurial dynamism; and (3) in geospatial terms, there are positive spatial spillovers and negative spatial interaction effects for both house prices and entrepreneurial dynamism in Yangtze River Delta cities.

This paper investigates the effect of administrative level on local economic growth from the perspective of officials' rank. We notice an interesting phenomenon that higher-ranking local officials (HRO) serve in cities with lower administrative level, can effectively improve economic performance similar to the effect of promoting administrative level of local government. Based on prefecture-level city data from 2001 to 2019, we find that HRO can significantly promote local economic growth, especially in cities with lower levels of development. The mechanism analysis shows that the HRO cities not only could receive upper-level government's favoritism but also tend to shape good business environment to attract investment. Further, HRO is a softer and shorter way than a formal change of regional administrative level, with less negative impact on the surrounding regions. The results provide new evidence that raising administrative level promotes regional development.

It is of great significance to explore the causality between regional integration (RI) and PM_2.5 pollution within urban agglomerations in the current pursuit of ecological civilization construction and high-quality development. Using panel data of 285 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2016, this study considers the expansion of the city economic coordination committee in Yangtze River Delta (YRDECC) as a quasi-natural experiment of RI, and use a difference-in difference method to explore the effect and inner mechanisms of RI on PM_2.5 concentration. After a descriptive analysis of the spatial-temporal variation trend of the PM_2.5 concentration in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration, the empirical results show that RI helps to alleviate 4.8% of the PM_2.5 concentration overall. For the original cities, the reduction effect on the PM_2.5 concentration is 5.2%, for the new cities, however, RI exacerbates 2.1% of the local PM_2.5 concentration. A series of robustness tests confirm the validity of the baseline results, and further indicate that the effect of RI remains significant in the long term and starts to increase from the third year. Furthermore, the reduction effect of RI on PM_2.5 concentration is more pronounced in cities with larger scales, more developed economies, and higher degrees of marketization. The mechanism analysis shows that industrial transfer, population migration and technological innovation are significant channels of RI that affect PM_2.5 concentrations. The conclusions of this paper provide a new path to alleviate PM_2.5 pollution and achieve ecological conservation and high-quality development in the city cluster area.

Big socio-economic well-being gap is common across countries and regions. This study examines the impact of tourism on socio-economic well-being and its convergence from a comprehensive and inter-regional convergence perspective. Using panel data of 291 cities during the period 2005–2019, we provide the comprehensive evaluation of socio-economic well-being at the city scale in China. Considering the dynamic characteristics of socio-economic well-being, we therefore estimate the impact using the system generalized method of moments. The result indicates that tourism significantly enhances local socio-economic well-being and is found to be robust. We also find the dominance of domestic tourism, the positive moderator effects of general budget expenditure, GDP per capita and urbanization, and a greater driving force in cities with higher socio-economic well-being. Since both β- and σ-convergence hold, we confirm the positive effect of tourism on the convergence of inter-regional socio-economic well-being. We emphasize policies support for tourism development in underdeveloped regions through fiscal expenditure, financial transfer payments, intellectual support, urbanization, and infrastructure construction. We suggest incorporating tourism into frameworks such as rural revitalization and regional coordinated development. We also recommend accelerating the expansion of tourism in underdeveloped regions and enhancing the quality of tourism in developed regions as spatial strategies, while emphasizing inter-regional tourism coordination and cooperation.

Innovation can lead to wage inequalities through different channels. This paper explores this relationship, focusing on the direct and spillover (indirect) effects of these channels on personal wage inequalities in Brazilian regions. Product and process innovation are measured by patents and the acquisition of foreign technology through imports of capital goods respectively. Based on data that covers 482 regions from 2003 to 2014, we use the Spatial Durbin Model with spatial fixed effects to control spatial dependence and heterogeneity across regions. The results point to a positive association between our measures of innovation and wage inequalities. However, as we found a non-linear relationship between imports of capital goods and wage inequality, an increase in imports of capital goods may reduce wage inequality. Other variables may also cause inequality to fall, such as the share of the population with a higher education degree and social skills. Drivers behind an increase in inequality are female participation in the workforce and the level of GDP per capita.