Journal of Regional Science最新文献

The aim of this study is to perform a locally specific investigation of a polycentric development policy through the lens of the property market. The capital city of China, Beijing, adopted a subcenter program for the purpose of developing a new economic growth pole in the suburbs through the redistribution of administrative and economic resources. Herein, we exploit spatial and temporal differencing in microproperty transaction data to address the issue of nonrandom selection of the site for developing the subcenter. The results show that in the first year after announcing the subcenter program, property prices in the subcenter rose by 10.5%, stabilizing at approximately 20% after 2 years of continuous increase. Moreover, property price growth decreases sharply with increased distance from the new administrative center in the subcenter, which will host tens of thousands of civil servants under the subcenter program. In response to the subcenter-induced demand shock, locations with elastically supplied housing have experienced greater population growth and weaker appreciation in property prices. Although strict purchase restrictions have helped stabilize the subcenter's property market to some extent, the fever has spread to adjacent markets. The specific geography of property market dynamics provides an important channel to evaluate the impact of the subcenter program and offers insight regarding the development of tactics to optimize subcenter outcomes.

We test whether investors rationally react to rent news when pricing houses. Previous literature on house pricing uses aggregated housing price and rent data to estimate the rent news. We analytically demonstrate that using aggregated data biases the rationality test because it forces researchers to estimate the rent news using the cross-project average dynamic relationship among the housing return, rent growth, and macroeconomic dynamics and, hence, misses the heterogeneity in the dynamic relationship. Our empirical tests using proprietary project-level housing data from China's megacities find that the bias from missing the heterogeneity is economically substantial.

What is the economic impact of joining a currency union? Is this impact heterogeneous across regions? And how does it change in case of a recession? We answer these questions by investigating the economic impact of joining the euro area for the latecomers, that is, the eastern European countries that adopted the euro after 2002. Differently from previous literature, we use NUTS-2 regions as units of analysis. This novelty allows us to investigate the theoretical predictions of a currency union impact at a more appropriate geographical level. Using a recently developed counterfactual approach, we estimate the overall as well as the disaggregated impact of joining the euro area. We find that the adoption of the euro brought about a small positive effect, which was, however, dampened by the Great Recession. Individual regional estimates suggest heterogeneous returns with benefits accruing mostly to core regions.

To resolve the dilemma among a shortage of high-end talents, low level of scientific research and a huge brain drain in western universities in China, we proposes a way out by building an intelligence-alliance innovation team—a new interregional and multiagent cooperation mode. We identify major disagreements that hamper a fruitful collaboration, and then analyze reasons of such poor coordination. Given diversified backgrounds and different preferences of intelligence-alliance innovation teams, we suggest multiagent group decision-making as a method of seeking task coordination for participants in conflict and their problem-solvers. Finally, a specific case is given to prove that this method can improve task coordination of intelligence-alliance innovation teams, and that holistic feedback coordination may be the best scheme of task coordination for intelligence-alliance innovation teams.

Homeowners who make their homes their primary residence have resisted the entry of rentals into their neighborhoods and cities. Possible reasons underlying this resistance are that rentals reduce the property values, increase the property tax burdens, and raise the price of public services for these homeowners. We relate the market values of single-family homes occupied by permanent homeowners, the effective property tax rate of these homeowners, and the tax price they pay for public services to shifts in their city's housing units toward a variety of different types of rentals and second homes. Our analysis is based on large panels of Florida homes containing hundreds of thousands and millions of observations. Our results show that increases in the share of a city's housing units used as rentals or second homes reduce the home values, increase the property tax burdens, and raise the public services prices of homeowners who permanently reside in single-family homes. Impacts vary in magnitude among single-family, condominium, and mobile homes used as rentals and second homes. Estimated impacts are the strongest for share increases in single-family rentals and second homes.

The article investigates the effect of crime on firm entry rates in Italian provinces over the period 2007–2016. The extant literature focuses mainly on the relationship between crime and the sorting of new businesses. The present paper contributes to this stream of work by estimating the effect of crime on the overall propensity to engage in entrepreneurial activities across a national territory. We measure the extent to which property and violent crime affect firm entry rates using an instrumental variable approach in which the instrument for criminal activity is the effective abortion rate. Our findings suggest that crime has a negative, sizable impact on firm entry. The results are robust to alternative instrumental variables and firm entry indicators. This empirical exercise emphasizes the need to consider loss of new business activities as a downstream effect when computing the social costs of crime.

What characterizes regions where right-wing populist parties are relatively successful? A prominent hypothesis proposed in the emerging “geography of discontent” literature claims that places that are “left behind” constitute a breeding ground for the rise of populism. We re-examine this hypothesis by analyzing the rise of populism in Germany. Our results suggest that high vote shares of populist parties are associated with the long-term decline of a region's relative welfare, which goes beyond a lifespan of people inhabiting such “left behind” places. Moreover, we are able to show that a place-based collective memory about past prosperity plays a crucial role in shaping present resentment. Finally, we find the education level of the regional population to be an important channel through which the collective memory about the past translates into populism support today.

This paper studies the impact of urban density, city government efficiency, and medical resources on COVID-19 infection and death outcomes in China. We adopt a simultaneous spatial dynamic panel data model to account for (i) the simultaneity of infection and death outcomes, (ii) the spatial pattern of the transmission, (iii) the intertemporal dynamics of the disease, and (iv) the unobserved city-specific and time-specific effects. We find that, while population density increases the level of infections, government efficiency significantly mitigates the negative impact of urban density. We also find that the availability of medical resources improves public health outcomes conditional on lagged infections. Moreover, there exists significant heterogeneity at different phases of the epidemiological cycle.