Journal of Regional Science最新文献

This article shows that digital capital and working from home were essential for the resilience of local labour markets in the context of the COVID-19 crisis in Germany. Employment responses differed widely across local labour markets, with differences in short-time work rates of up to 30 percentage points at the beginning of the pandemic. Using recent advancements in the difference-in-differences approach with a continuous treatment, we find that digital capital potential higher by one standard deviation led to a short-time work rate that was lower by 1.5 percentage points on average at the onset of the shock. The effect was nonlinear, disproportionately disadvantaging regions at the lower end of the digital capital distribution. We also find that working from home potential led to lower short-time work, especially during the first lockdown period. However, digital capital smoothed the employment shock beyond the effect of remote work, extending into 2021. Moreover, local digital capital potential increased the adoption of remote work after the shock.

Public transportation networks connect poor urban households in food deserts to grocery options and nutritious food. This paper examines how the exit of public transit options in an urban food desert affects a household's access to and utilization of grocery stores over drug and dollar stores, as well as the healthfulness of the foods these households purchase. I create an original data set of all transportation network changes across 138 cities in the US over the period 2008–2019. I combine this with UPC codes of all consumer packaged goods bought by tens of thousands of urban households over the same period. The exit of public transportation options in an urban food desert is associated with a significant decrease in the number of yearly trips below median income households make to grocery stores and an increase in the number of yearly trips made to drug and dollar stores. Further, households that experience such an exit subsequently buy fewer healthy foods and more unhealthy foods. The results from this study suggest that maintaining public transit infrastructure is an important public policy concern and that cuts to public transit networks directly impact urban households' access to nutritious food.

Recent geopolitical conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, coupled with a geopoliticization of trade, triggered the transition toward a new trade policy, moving away from managing interdependencies to managing dependency through economic security principles, embracing Open Strategic Autonomy. While a New Normal Trade Policy may be fundamental in restoring the European level playing field in international trade, it will not be exempt from costs that will affect regions differently, as geoeconomic fragmentation may significantly hurt low-income regions, negatively affecting living standards. In this paper, we assess the regional income distribution of the New Normal Trade Policy scenario, through MASST5 model simulations. The model simulates GDP growth rates at NUTS2 level for all EU member countries + UK under the assumptions of the new trade policy. Simulations are based on a combination of internally coherent assumptions formalizing the EU's approach to the New Normal Trade Policy, mostly dealing with the risk diversification of trade partners in industries deemed strategic by the EU, with the extra investment in digital technologies, and with a reduction in within EU trade barriers. Estimated gains are spatially heterogeneous. Regions growing fastest include noncapital urban areas, Western European regions, manufacturing regions, and regions with strong institutions. Growth drivers differ, with high-level functions boosting Western regions, while Eastern regions focus on production-related ones. Between-country disparities increase, yet within-country inequalities tend to grow less due to the advantages of nonmanufacturing areas in Western countries; overall these trends would lead to a slowdown in territorial inequalities.

In this article, we provide a spatial computable general equilibrium model that is suitable for the analysis of transformative activities within the framework of Smart Specialization and able to support the selection between alternative activities. These activities play a crucial role in regional structural transformation; however, the selection mechanism between them is not evident, and the literature has provided little guidance. To improve the efficiency of the selection process, it is important to assess, among many other aspects, the expected economic impact of each entrepreneurial idea. We extended the GMR economic impact assessment model's framework to account for potential transformative activities as new industries. We integrated real entrepreneurial ideas discovered in Baranya county, Hungary, using micro-data to evaluate their potential local economic effects and reveal the key factors behind these impacts.

Place-based policies can change the spatial distribution of retail stores and consumers. We develop a general equilibrium model in which consumers make a single shopping trip and freely choose where to reside. By using this model, we evaluate the welfare impacts of place-based policies for downtown retail agglomeration to clarify what place-based policies are efficient. Results show that the efficiency of place-based policies depends on the recipients of government subsidies, consumers or stores, even if the policies promote retail agglomeration in downtown areas. Using a utility function with the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) subutility for varieties, we examine the welfare impacts of these place-based policies. We demonstrate that subsidizing consumers to relocate near downtown areas is inevitably harmful from the viewpoint of welfare under the CES, whereas subsidizing retail stores is efficient.

In this article, we set out the relationships between the behavioral and spatial responses to working from home. The analytical framework centres explicitly on the choice of commuting frequency as the key decision-making variable that endogenously reshapes the relationships between other spatial and nonspatial variables as a result of the work-from-home revolution. We find that optimal commuting frequency is positively related to the opportunity costs of less-than-continuous face-to-face interaction and inversely related to commuting costs. As well as a “ donut effect” with growth in the suburbs and hinterlands around cities, our results also identify a “shadow effect” in smaller cities. The reason is that, somewhat counterintuitively, commuting frequency optimisation magnifies the benefits of working from home in larger cities because of a greater decrease in the burden of commuting. Our results imply enhanced productivity of larger cities over smaller cities, suggesting that the economic divergence between large cities and left-behind places is likely to persist.