Journal of Regional Science最新文献

Enhanced transportation infrastructure improves the frequency of travel and facilitates face-to-face communication. Will the resulting reduction in travel cost mitigate the geographical concentration of knowledge spillovers? Our empirical strategy exploits China's mass expansion of its intercity high-speed railway network as a natural experiment. Using patent citations as the proxy for knowledge spillovers, we find inventors increasingly rely on more distant knowledge after rail connection and newly connect cities' innovation performance improves substantially.

This paper measures how much more households pay for less density in their immediate surroundings. Using transaction and administrative data and exploiting the introduction of a regulation that restricted the number of housing units for certain land lots, we find that households discount density: a 10% increase in within-development density decreases the price per square meter by 5%. Further, the mean price per square meter of the average development increased by 1%–3% after the regulation was introduced, while the amount of built-up space remained constant. The increase in total revenue suggests developers may underestimate the externality caused by density.

History shows that wars can be enormously disruptive of economic activity, especially international trade, national income, and global economic welfare. This article analyzes the impact on the European regions the Russian invasion of Ukraine using the largest and most updated multiregional input-output model for Europe. Two shocks, trade and inflation, and four alternative scenarios are simulated. The scenarios are considered regarding the number of countries applying a trade embargo, the exemption of oil and gas, and the potential trade diversions with third countries such as China. We obtained a significant fall in GDP (−1.7%), 3.7 m lost jobs and 3% raise over the prewar inflation rate. For trade shock, large indirect effects are obtained, indicating the high relevance of the sectors and countries exposed to the war and the sanctions. The republics of the former Soviet Union, as well as the satellite countries of the former communism, face the harshest adverse impacts. This work shows the importance of breaking Russia's colonial economic ties to the countries in Eastern Europe.

Homogeneous national policies can generate heterogeneous effects on the territory. This paper aims to verify the impact of the entry of single Italian municipalities into an inter-municipal association on the unitary costs of the social services supplied to the local communities. Panel cost stochastic frontier model in the presence of endogeneity has been introduced based on two pillars: a counterfactual setting to verify the aggregation effects concerning a set of similar municipalities and the use of a cost efficiency estimation methodology which considers the endogeneity of output with respect to cost. The results of our analysis show that the effects of adopting associated forms of service delivery can be very multifaceted and diversified according to the typology and the degree of implementation of the Municipal Union itself. The analysis sheds light on the effects of municipalities' organisational choices, addressing the consolidation of small municipalities not in binary terms but also—and above all—suggesting that it is the type of union that impacts the possibility of convergence towards greater cost efficiency.

This paper examines the determinants of early school leaving (ESL) in a panel of 371 regions of OECD countries observed between 1998 and 2019. The empirical analysis includes both local factors previously emphasized by micro-economic studies and national-level factors such as education policies. We find that labor market opportunities for young people, as captured by the youth unemployment rate or the size of low-skill sectors, can pull students out of school. Conversely, late access to a large number of vocational education tracks, high preprimary enrollment and continuous training for teachers are strongly and negatively correlated with ESL rates.

Fiber internet expansion represents a path to improved economic vitality for Americans, but it is unclear who benefits from it and by how much. We examine the effects of subsidized fiber internet expansion on home prices and homebuyer demographics using data from Wisconsin and an IV approach to correct for fiber network endogeneity. We find fiber internet increases urban and rural housing values by 1.83% ($3,462) and decreases the likelihood a homebuyer is white by 2.88%, but in urban areas only. Fiber internet therefore does not appear to drive minority homebuyers away but may contribute to the urban-rural racial divide.

In the past 50 years, a voluminous literature estimating the value of schools through capitalization in home prices has emerged. Prior research has identified capitalization using a variety of approaches including discontinuities caused by boundaries. Here, we use changes in school boundaries and the opening of a new school in Fayette County (Lexington), Kentucky to identify this capitalization. Critical to properly estimating the effect of redistricting is to account for when information on redistricting is available. We treat the information about the effects of zoning as occurring in three stages: announcement of the intent to open the new high school and redistricting, approval of the specific redistricting plan (map), and implementation (opening of the new high school and actual changes in boundaries). We find significant changes in values for homes redistricted from lower-performing schools and we find that this capitalization occurs well before implementation of the redistricting. As we show, failure to account for capitalization occurring before implementation will attenuate and even change the sign of capitalization.

We study the effect of Law 81/1993, which introduced a different rule for the election of mayors, on the technical efficiency of Italian cities over the period 1998–2006. Since 1993, municipalities below 15,000 inhabitants vote with a single-ballot system, whereas cities above 15,000 inhabitants are subject to a double ballot. We first estimate the output-oriented technical efficiency of municipalities through data envelopment analysis, and then we perform a regression discontinuity design analysis by exploiting the exogenous change in the electoral scheme at the 15,000 inhabitants cut-off. We find evidence that municipalities voting under a double-ballot rule show lower levels of efficiency—in terms of provision of public goods—compared with cities voting under a single-ballot scheme, by about 6.5%. This effect is driven by inefficiencies registered in specific sectors, that is, police, education, and maintenance of roads. Furthermore, the overall lower efficiency of municipalities voting under runoff is related to the different level of educational attainment of elected mayors, whereas it is not driven by the features of Law 81/1993 relating to the number of lists forming a coalition in support of mayoral candidates and to disjoint votes.

The impact of the incumbent state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the births of new private-owned enterprises (POEs) in China is a central concern for the government and society. In this paper, we apply agglomeration theories to distinguish the linkages between SOEs and POEs. Using China's 2008 economic census, the 2007 Input-Output Table, and the 2005 population census, we measure the formation of new POEs at the city-industry level, and the agglomeration forces of distance proximity to inputs, outputs, labor, and technology. More explicitly, we measure the extent to which local SOEs provide relevant inputs, consume outputs, employ similar workers, and use similar technology. Our findings indicate that overall, incumbent SOEs hinder the formation of new POEs. For manufacturing, the entry of new POEs is significantly lower in places where more upstream SOEs are concentrated. For services, the entry of new POEs is significantly lower in places where more upstream and downstream SOEs are concentrated. However, the agglomeration effects from the incumbent POEs are either insignificant or significantly positive.

The purpose of this paper is to spatially and regionally examine academic engagement within Brazil, identifying patterns. Moreover, our investigation can contribute to a better understanding of how knowledge can be turned into a tool to fight regional inequality. We depart from two hypotheses: first, universities situated in peripheral regions interact more with companies from relatively more dynamic regions, and second, in the absence of industrial knowledge demand, universities tend to collaborate more closely with a diverse range of stakeholders in the region. To evaluate these hypotheses and find empirical evidence, we consider 4497 research groups and 4603 nonacademic organizations as “nodes” connected by 8830 collaborations throughout all Brazilian regions. Social network tools are used to illustrate the spatial and regional dimensions of academic engagement more accurately. The results show that academic engagement is not regionally homogeneous, demonstrating essential differences regarding local nonacademic partnerships. Innovation policies, which encourage only university–firm interactions, perpetuate regional inequality.