Journal of Regional Science最新文献

I analyze the effect of historical emigration on current attitudes towards immigrants and migration policies in central and southern Italy. To do so, I collect data on Italian emigrants by the municipality of last residence from the Ellis Island archives in the period 1892–1924. I estimate, then, the causal effect of emigration on a series of outcomes used to measure attitudes towards immigration through an IV strategy, by exploiting exogenous variation in proximity to departure port to the U.S. during the years 1892-1924. I find that emigration has a negative and significant long-run effect on attitudes towards immigration. In particular, higher historical emigration reduces the propensity to open refugees reception centers, social expenditure, volunteers in non-profit organizations and significantly decreases political support for more inclusive parties.

While prior research has emphasized the path-dependent nature of occupational systems, it has paid limited attention to how local industrial structures contribute to occupational change. To address this gap, this study examines how regional occupational evolution is shaped by two distinct mechanisms: (1) path-dependent skill and knowledge transfer, whereby new occupations emerge through the recombination of existing occupational structures; and (2) industry-driven task reconfiguration, through which industrial upgrading reshapes the demand for occupations. To operationalize these dynamics, the concept of industry–occupation cross-relatedness is introduced, capturing the proximity between new occupations and a region's existing industrial portfolio. Drawing on panel data from 241 Chinese cities between 2000 and 2015, the study estimates the effects of both occupational relatedness and cross-relatedness on new occupation specialization. The results reveal that both mechanisms significantly promote occupational evolution, yet they tend to function as substitutes rather than complements. Furthermore, their effects differ across skill levels: high-skilled occupations are more responsive to industrial transformation, low-skilled occupations to occupational pathways, while medium-skilled occupations exhibit relatively weak responsiveness to both. These findings underscore the importance of structural conditions and skill heterogeneity in shaping regional patterns of occupational change.

This study examines the effect of natural disasters on regional innovation in the United States between 1994 and 2018. Using a comprehensive dataset of patents and natural disasters at the county level, we employ a panel-fixed-effects model to estimate the causal impact of disasters on patent applications. Our findings reveal that natural disasters significantly hinder innovation, with patent applications decreasing by 2%–2.4% in 2–4 years after a disaster event. The results remain robust in alternative samples, specifications, and endogeneity tests using propensity score matching and placebo tests. The dynamic effects demonstrate a persistent decline in patenting over time, with no evidence of pretrends. In addition, we find that the negative impact of disasters on innovation is particularly pronounced in counties with lower levels of human capital and financial infrastructure. Our findings suggest that natural disasters disrupt regional innovation systems, divert resources, and impede technological progress.

In the context of China's dynamic economic landscape, our research investigates the influence of traffic convenience (TC) on the proliferation of startup companies (SCs) across diverse geographic regions and industries. Utilizing panel data covering the period from 2000 to 2019 and encompassing 278 cities, we constructed a specialized data set for SCs in China using a text-based machine learning approach and employed highway density to measure TC. Our analysis reveals that a marginal increase of 1 m of highway per square kilometer is associated with an average increase of approximately 18 SCs, primarily concentrated in the tertiary sector. Further exploration into the channels underlying TC's impact on SC formation uncovers significant channel effects of foreign direct investment, regional product sales, and market potential. Moreover, the emergence of high-speed rail is also found to positively correlate with an increase in SC numbers. Our study identifies spatial and industrial disparities in the influence of TC, notably observing an insignificant effect on SCs in the northwestern and southern regions. Importantly, highway infrastructure improvements exert a lasting positive impact on startup formation, with effects remaining significant for up to 3 years. These findings contribute to the advancement of enterprise growth theory and shed light on the intricate relationship between transportation infrastructure and the enterprise ecosystem, providing valuable insights for policymakers and stakeholders engaged in urban planning and regional economic development initiatives.

This paper employs the BP oil spill as a quasi-natural experiment and examines its effects on residential mortgage lending in the affected Gulf coast areas. We construct a unique dataset by using information from the Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Technique program and mapping those observations to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act lending dataset. Our difference-in-differences estimation results show that the denial rate of mortgage applications rose by nearly 2 percentage points as a result of the oil spill, whilst accounting for various fixed effects at the lender and census tract levels. We also find that the collateral value channel played a crucial role in the propagation mechanism of the oil spill and its impact on the lending activities of financial institutions. Furthermore, depending on lenders' funding models, the oil spill triggered a heterogeneous lending response, resulting in a more pronounced lending contraction for institutions with higher exposure to funding through securitization.