Growth and Change最新文献

Using survey data of millennials and older adults in Hamilton, Ontario, this exploratory study sought to identify daily travelers based on their attitudes and perceptions toward transportation modes using latent class analysis. Four daily traveler types are identified—“walk and transit-oriented travelers,” “car-oriented commuters,” “multimodal travelers,” and “car-oriented travelers.” The study also examined the association of different sociodemographic characteristics and trip attributes with the four traveler types. Findings suggest that heterogeneity exists within travel-related attitudes among different traveler types. Further, heterogeneous traveler types exist among individuals belonging to the same generation, with the same living arrangements and possession of a driver's license.

Charter schools have become one of the most popular school choice programs in recent years. While being accused of endangering the fiscal health of local school districts, charter school proliferation could also be the result of fiscal stress of local school districts. However, this reverse causation has not been fully studied in the literature. Using data of local school districts in Ohio from 2011 to 2019, I adopt an Instrumental Variable approach to investigate the possible scenario that the rapid growth in charter school enrollment could be caused by fiscal stress of school districts. The results suggest that the inadequate funding from state and local sources had led to a significant increase in charter school enrollment for urban districts, although the charter demand is inelastic to public funding changes. Students could be left with no better options but to choose charter schools over failing traditional public schools.

This study empirically investigates the direct and indirect (spillover) effects of three types of industrial agglomeration with different cognitive distances, namely, industrial specialization, industrial related variety, and industrial unrelated variety, on regional innovation. Accordingly, we applied the concepts of related and unrelated variety and used spatial econometric analysis. Based on panel data of 283 Chinese cities from 2004 to 2016, the empirical results reveal that both industrial specialization and industrial related variety significantly improve regional innovation and produce positive spatial spillover effects on the surrounding regions. However, industrial unrelated variety has a significant negative impact on regional innovation and produces a negative spatial spillover effect on the surrounding regions. Moreover, the direct and indirect effects of the three types of industrial agglomeration on regional innovation between China's coastal and inland cities. The findings have important theoretical and policy implications.

Many studies in economics and regional science claim a positive link between interpersonal trust and innovation by demonstrating a positive effect of trust on patenting. This contrasts many findings from organization level studies on trust and innovation, who report a variety of findings including inverted-U type relations. A possible explanation is that trust exhibits different roles in invention and innovation, as the former relies on knowledge commons while the latter directly embeds commercialization and the market context. This study attempts to reconcile the two set of findings by studying indicators of invention and innovation in relation to trust at the same unit of observation, by using the regional variation in Europe. I study the relationship between interpersonal trust and patent applications (a measure of invention), trademark applications (a composite indicator) and the share of innovative sales in turnover by SMEs (a direct indicator of commercialization), across European regions. I show that trust positively affects trademark applications with an effect that is comparable to that on patent applications. However, trust exhibits an inverted-U type relationship with innovative sales. Results collectively point to a strong role of trust in all three creative activities, including a negative effect at the higher end when the indicator is directly contingent on commercialization and sales. I also estimate the extent of spatial spillovers in the effect of trust on all three creative outcomes.

Tibet is the main consist of the Tibetan Plateau and also inhabited by minorities in China. How to promote its road accessibility and narrow the gap between different ethnic groups should draw more attention. This study analyzes both territorial accessibility (At) and potential accessibility (Ap) in Tibet from 2010 to 2020, as well as the disparities within and between main ethnic groups, exploring whether ethnic minorities undertook the accessibility disparity or loss. The findings are as follows: (1) At and Ap are characterized by a center-periphery structure with a remarkably improvement and spatial difference from 2010 to 2020. The disparity between counties tends to widen slightly, whereas the increment of At shows the opposite feature. (2) The Hui and Han ethnic groups enjoy better accessibility than Tibetans, and the other ethnic minorities have insufficient accessibility, though with prominent improvement. The disparity in At within ethnic groups is smaller but tends to widen; by contrast, that of Ap is larger but tends to narrow. The Hui ethnic group enjoys relative equal accessibility, which tends to be more so, while Tibetans face unequal accessibility with no obvious improvement. (3) The proportion of Tibetans is negatively correlated with the improved accessibility, but those of the other ethnic minorities are positively correlated with the increment of At, indicating that the accessibility improvement in Tibet tilts to the ethnic minorities in remote areas. The overall spatial disparities in accessibility in Tibet tend to widen, but this does not totally apply to those between and within ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the construction of transport infrastructure alone may not be able to achieve equality. Above results may provide reference for related research and policy making for remote and minority areas in China and other similar regions.

This article studies how three sets of regional factors—knowledge, agglomeration, and openness—impact and interact differently with startups and incumbent firms in their innovative capacity building. Based on a large dataset of Chinese high-tech firms, regression analysis shows that the speed of growing startup innovative capacity relies positively on regional knowledge stock and localization economies. In addition to regional knowledge stock, incumbent innovative capacity building benefits from urbanization economies and regional openness. Favorable regional factors, including the presence of universities and the clustering of knowledge-intensive peers, also enable startups (but not incumbents) to leverage internal knowledge assets into their innovative capacity. The results suggest that it is not only the access to the external knowledge environment but also proactive endeavors to cross-fertilize between internal and external knowledge that underlie the eco-systemic nature of startup innovative capacity building.

As universities have become more integrated into their communities and regions, their host cities have become locations of choice for the highly educated facilitating increased innovation and productivity rates in several locales. Recent transitions toward knowledge-driven economies have also intensified growing geographic divides along the lines of education and raised concerns about the possibility of brain drain in a growing number of cities/regions. This study examines the changing geography of highly educated individuals (2000–2017) with a focus on small and medium-sized U.S. metropolitan areas with and without research universities. Results indicate the continuing trend of divergence among regions, but research universities are found to complement (the lack of) talent agglomeration and generate spatial spillovers beyond the county boundaries.

Both entrepreneurship and foreign direct investment (FDI) are frequently identified as being sources of local and regional economic growth. However, the relationship between the two is not always clear, with a negative competition effect and a positive demand effect potentially present. China provides an interesting case to study with its large state-owned sector, combined with a recent history of successfully attracting considerable FDI. This study examines the relationship between self-employment and different elements of foreign influence (FI) at a provincial level. The results imply that foreign investment reduces the level of self-employment, whilst the number of foreign enterprises and foreign exports have positive effects. The results therefore show the importance in considering multiple perspectives in terms of FI. It appears that policies that attract individual large investments suppress the development of domestic enterprise as predicted by the competition effect, but where more foreign enterprises are present, and a cluster starts to develop, a demand effect appears to take over. This means that provincial government policy may need to be more nuanced to avoid economies being highly reliant on a limited number of what might be quite footloose larger foreign employers.