Journal of Regional Science最新文献

Using a panel data set comprising 284 prefecture-level and above cities in China during 2005–2018, this study develops a theoretical mechanism harnessing the spatial Durbin model (SDM) to accumulate evidence and explain how innovation affects China's economic growth. It is found that regional economic growth is facilitated by local innovation activities as well as the absorption capacity of innovation and technology spilled over from other regions. This study also identifies 12 regional innovation poles across the country, which are found to have played a significant role in promoting urban economic development within a physical distance range of 150 km of a given region. This finding attests to the radiation effect from regional innovation poles in cultivating more such poles for China, to promote sustainable high-quality economic growth, suggesting a route for China to avoid the curse of the middle-income trap.

Scholarship demonstrates that urban systems follow a power law population distribution if the population has full labor mobility. Theoretically, subpopulations should also follow a power law population distribution if that subpopulation also has full labor mobility. Examining city population distributions for White and Black Americans across US metropolitan areas from 1910 to 2020 shows that the White distribution mostly conforms to both Zipf's and Gibrat's laws throughout this period. In contrast, the Black population does not follow either law until the second half of the 20th century, a result that is consistent with theories of restricted mobility out of the South for Black Americans during the Jim Crow era.

This paper examines the impact of the arrival of Airbnb on local consumption amenities in Madrid. We exploit the exogenous variation created by the timing and uneven distribution of Airbnb listings in the city to determine the impact on food and beverage establishments. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we find positive local effects on both the number of restaurants and their employees: an increase of 14 Airbnb rooms in a given census tract leads to almost one more restaurant, and the same increase in a given neighborhood generates 11 new tourist-related employees. The results are robust to the specification and sample composition. This paper contributes to the literature on the economic impact of the platform economy on urban areas by providing evidence of market expansion externalities from short-term rentals.

Agglomeration economies can bring about positive externalities, while excessive agglomeration backfires. However, existing literature on place-based policies mainly focuses on policies that enhance agglomeration economies. Few studies discuss dispersion policies coping with the negative externality from excessive agglomeration. Owing to the unclear effects of dispersion policies, we conduct empirical research on the noncapital function relief (NCFR) policy, which is implemented to decrease the agglomeration in Beijing, the capital of China, and promote the development of surrounding areas. Exploiting the difference-in-difference model, we find that the NCFR policy implementation significantly facilitates the economic growth of the surrounding areas of Beijing. Changes in the distribution of new firm entry and population are two main channels, while no significant effect on the productivity is found. Furthermore, areas that are less-developed could benefit more from the NCFR policy. Our findings may enlighten other developing countries in urban economic management.

This study analyzes the evolution of educational and occupational patterns among migrants and natives, as well as income inequality in Germany from 1985 to 2015. We show that despite migrants catching up in education, employment, and income with their native counterparts, unfavorable societal attitudes toward them have remained virtually unchanged, which can be attributed to Bourdieu's conceptualization of cultural inheritance. We find that while income inequality has increased significantly over the 30-year period, this trend varied considerably by the federal state and that migration did nothing to add to inequality. Since both the German economy and society rely on migrants, there is a strong need for the narratives toward migrants to be based on empirical evidence. The findings of this study hold migrant-related policy implications not only for Germany but also for other developed nations that rely on migrants as a labor force.

Natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, and wildfires are projected to become more prevalent in the foreseeable future. Climate risk is, therefore, increasingly recognized as an important factor by policy makers, the investment community, and financial markets. Due to the immobility of assets, the commercial real estate industry is especially vulnerable to climate risk, and there is an increasing interest to understand the impact of climate risk on the value of commercial real estate. For commercial real estate lenders, changes in collateral value are only of partial importance. The ability of borrowers to meet their payment obligations is equally, if not more important. By combining historical data on two major climate-related disasters—Hurricanes Harvey and Sandy—with longitudinal information on commercial mortgage performance, this paper identifies the impact of climate risks on mortgage delinquency rates for commercial real estate mortgages. The results show that both Harvey and Sandy led to elevated levels of commercial mortgage delinquency, with significant heterogeneity based on the extent of damage in the Census block group. Information provided through FEMA 100-year floodplain maps partially mitigates the effects, an indication that lenders incorporate flood risk information in the underwriting process. An analysis of potential mechanisms indicates a decrease in property income during the 2-year period following the event for Hurricane Harvey, but no evidence of income effects for Sandy.

The opening of high-speed rail (HSR), as an exogenous shock, has had a profound and complex effect on social life. This study analyzes the effect of the opening of HSR on social trust. Results show that the opening of HSR promotes social trust. Mechanism analysis showed that although the opening of HSR accelerated population mobility and decreased trust in strangers, economic growth and improvement of local social issues mitigated the negative effects of its opening. In addition, our results also show that individuals turn to trust in their parents, neighbors, and doctors. Considering the potential endogeneity problem, instrumental variable and difference-in-differences estimators consistently indicated the promoting effect of the HSR opening on trust. Heterogeneity analysis showed that the opening of HSR had a greater effect on female, urban residents, younger groups, and married people. Last, cities with larger populations and tourist cities were more vulnerable to shocks.

This paper provides estimates of local employment multipliers from large, publicly subsidized firms. We use a synthetic control weighted difference-in-difference estimation procedure that matches treated areas with comparison areas to generate local employment multiplier estimates. We show that local employment multiplier estimates have a high degree of uncertainty, with a wide range of point estimates (both positive and negative) and varying degrees of statistical significance. There is a concentration of positive employment multipliers from manufacturing facilities, but little correlation between estimated multipliers and subsidy value. We demonstrate that our approach produces drastically different results than a traditional difference-in-difference approach.

Long-distance commuting (LDC) is an increasingly relevant strategy of labor mobility worldwide and is therefore key to understanding the structure and dynamics of labor markets. However, little is known about the effect that LDC has on the labor market equilibrium of host territories. This paper addresses this gap for the case of Chile. While LDC is a useful strategy for improving salary and employment on a national scale, our results show a negative effect for residents in host territories (on a local scale), particularly when LDC results in commuters with similar characteristics to residents competing for the same jobs.

We investigate the migration-inward foreign direct investment (FDI) nexus in narrow geographies. A novel two-stage empirical strategy allows us to investigate the role of migration as a determinant of multinational enterprises (MNEs) location choices and unpick heterogeneity in foreign investors' preferences towards the presence of migrants in the host location. This allows us to shed light on the relative importance of the underlying mechanisms linking migration and inward FDI. Relying on 1113 greenfield investments by 895 MNEs in Italian NUTS3 regions over 2003–2015, we find that immigrants from the country of origin of the investor exert a positive but highly heterogeneous effect on MNE location choices. Investors are more sensitive to the presence of migrants from their country of origin when they lack experience in the destination country (first-time investors) and when their investments concern market-access or business-services (downstream) activities. This is consistent with the view that migrants act as information brokers that bridge the fixed costs of international business activities.