Journal of Regional Science最新文献

In this study, we examine the interplay between regional digital financial inclusion and social capital with a focus on social trust. Our empirical analysis shows that regions with enhanced digital financial services experience a significant boost in social trust. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in regional digital financial inclusion correlates with an approximate increase of 1% in social trust among frequent Internet users compared with infrequent users. We futher find that growth in social trust is largely attributable to noneconomic factors, such as improvements in perceived fairness. Conversely, the economic factor of increased individual income exhibits limited explanatory strength in this context. These findings shed light on the dynamics of regional development and highlight critical policy considerations for fostering social capital through digital finance.

This article aims to incorporate social relations into panel hedonic price modeling analyses, examining how the social conditions of neighborhoods are integrated into local housing markets. To achieve this, we utilize Jefferson County, Kentucky, as a case study and decompose publicly available 311 data, which consist of nonemergency concerns and requests reported by residents, into subcategories to proxy the diverse aspects of social relations. Our findings reveal several key insights: (1) 311 data are characterized by their complexity and encompass a wide range of inputs from residents, necessitating careful interpretation; (2) the overall number of 311 reports may offer limited utility in disclosing social relations; (3) specific categories of 311 reports pertaining to public domain issues hold potential as indicators of social relations. Reports on incivilities, for instance, can serve as proxies for conflicting social relations and exhibit negative impacts on housing prices. Conversely, reports on natural deterioration, environmental concerns, and planning issues demonstrate positive impacts on housing prices, suggesting their utility as indicators for social capital within housing studies.

I examine the short-run impact of taxing ride-sharing trips on the price and usage of ride-sharing across different neighborhoods of Chicago and investigate whether the tax had unequal effects on neighborhoods with different racial compositions. I document significant heterogeneity in price increases due to the tax across neighborhoods of departure, showing that this was correlated with their differential access to alternatives to ride-sharing, such as public transit. Clustering neighborhoods based on their racial composition reveals that Black areas experienced particularly high price increases and reductions in usage. Overall, the burden of the tax fell more heavily on minority-concentrated areas.

We introduce a new class of measures called spatial population concentration (SPC) designed to quantify how many people live on average within a given radius of every person within a geographic area. The distinguishing feature relative to existing measures is that ours are the first to satisfy scale invariance, replication invariance, sensitivity to transfers, aggregativity, sensitivity to neighborhoods, invariance to uninhabited regions, concurrently. We calculate the SPC measure at the US county level for various radii and identify that the strongest relationship with subsequent economic growth can be found for a 25-km radius. Interacting SPC with diverse infrastructure metrics does not alter the optimal radius. This indicates that regional policies such as infrastructure projects which influence density should strategically target the 25-km distance range to maximize the growth impact. We also show that the importance of SPC has declined over time.

From around the 2008 crisis there has been a marked slowdown in UK productivity. This has been referred to as a productivity puzzle as there is no consensus on the key explanations for this slowdown. Using data for all the 168 International Territorial Level 3 areas in Great Britain (2004–2020), we make two empirical contributions to the literature on this puzzle. First, we are the first to analyze this productivity puzzle using a stochastic frontier model to account for technical inefficiency. Second, to aid policymakers we uncover the areas that represent spatial total factor productivity (TFP) growth hubs, spokes, leaders and followers. Of the components of TFP growth (growth rates of technical change, returns to scale and efficiency), we find that Britain's productivity slowdown can be more specifically described as a rise in inefficiency.

This paper compares the size distributions of cities when they are measured using gridded population and nighttime lights (NTLs) data. To do so, we exploit recent and accurate satellite imagery to proxy urban economic activity. Similarly to related studies, our results suggest that population is more equally distributed than lights at the country level. However, and calling assumptions established for urban NTLs into question, our findings do not support a Pareto function for their distribution. We also obtain evidence of a nonlinear and heterogeneous link between population and lights for a global sample of cities. Grounded on our empirical analysis, we develop a simple theoretical framework that relates the difference between the distributions of population and light emissions to the strength of agglomeration economies.

Oates, (1972) argues that local governments cannot use conventional policies to stabilize economies, due to fiscal spillovers and beggar-thy-neighbor policies. Hayek's theory implies it is efficient for a central government to devolve decision-making authority to local governments that have informational advantages. This paper tests the different theoretical implications by examining a natural experiment caused by the income-tax-sharing reform in China. Our analysis reveals that local government size does have a stabilization effect, but vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) substantially weakens this stabilizing effect; lack of local information is the key factor leading to this influence of VFI.

In this paper we study the role of within-city roads layout in fostering city growth. Within-city roads networks have not been studied extensively in economics although they are essential to facilitate human interactions, which are at the core of agglomeration economies. We build and compute several simple measures of roads network and construct a sample of over 1800 cities and towns from Sub-Saharan Africa. Using a simple econometric model and two instrumental variable strategies based on the history of African cities, we then estimate the causal impact of within-city roads layout on urban growth. We find that over the recent decades, cities with greater road density and road evenness in the centre grew faster.

Using a novel geospatial panel combined with data from the 2015 American Community Survey (ACS), we investigate the effect of topography—altitude and terrain unevenness—on income segregation at the neighborhood level. Specifically, we perform large-scale counterfactual simulations by estimating household preferences for topography, altering the topographical profile of each city, and observing the resulting neighborhood sorting outcome. We find that unevenness contributes to the segmentation of markets: in the absence of hilliness, rich and poor households experience greater mixing. Hillier cities are more income-segregated because of their unevenness; the opposite is true for flatter cities.

We re-examine the respective role of local density and local concentration of human capital in the agglomeration gains for about 750,00 individuals working in 304 commuting zones of metropolitan France over the period 2009–2015. Agglomeration gains are mostly driven by human capital effects over this period. Also, because it absorbs dynamic learning effects, the use of worker fixed effects to address spatial sorting of individuals may underestimate, by about two third, the wage premium with respect to local concentration of human capital over a midterm period. Finally, wage gaps stem more from differences in human capital in the private sector than in the public sector. We do not find evidence of a multiplier effect of public employment on local human capital externalities in the private sector.