Journal of Regional Science最新文献

This paper investigates the impact of the main criterion employed by the European Commission for the allocation of the largest portion of Structural Funds, based on the threshold of the 75% of European Union (EU) average gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We focus on the 2014–2020 programming period and on EU-15 regions to analyze if this criterion has penalized some of them, as a consequence of the 2004 EU enlargement, which has represented an exogenous shock in the allocation process, due to the economic backwardness of new member states. Through the application of Synthetic Control Methods and Difference-in-Differences estimators at different geographical scales, we show that regions that did not obtain the less developed status in both the programming period 2007–2013 and 2014–2020, but that would have obtained it in the period 2014–2020 without the 2004 EU enlargement, experienced a significantly lower GDP per capita growth between −10.5% and −5.7%. Conversely, territories that in the period 2014–2020 lost the less developed status, previously obtained in the time frame 2007–2013, were not characterized by a significantly lower economic growth, providing some evidence of the effectiveness of the safety net.

This paper investigates the role played by public capital on the production level of Italian regions by specifically accounting for the quality of institutions. Our analysis, carried out over the period 2000–2019, benefits from a rich data set on public expenditures. This allows us to build the regional public capital stock by distinguishing among public institutions in charge of the investments and sectors of intervention. While controlling for several contextual variables (human capital, technological capital, and population density), the main results show that public capital has a positive and significant effect on production. Most interestingly, looking at Mezzogiorno's regions, public capital carried out by local institutions turns out to have a lower impact than in the rest of the Italian regions. On the other hand, central bodies in the South exhibit an impact higher than the average. Moreover, institutions' quality exhibits a positive and significant effect on regional economic performance. These results cast serious doubts about the local Southern administrations' capacity to effectively manage the National Recovery and Resilience Plan's enormous resources and the new European Union cohesion framework 2021–2027. Our results are also relevant for other European regions that, featuring structural traits similar to Southern Italian regions, are expected to face the same difficulties in managing public funding.

This paper uses high-frequency nighttime lights data and a variety of empirical methods to analyze the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis on economic activity during the period January 2020–March 2021 for a global sample of 2841 cities. Particular attention is paid to the role of a city's population density in shaping these impacts. While economic activity in cities is found to be negatively affected by both the spread of the virus and the imposition of nonpharmaceutical interventions, population density is found to amplify the negative impacts of the spread of the virus and attenuate those of nonpharmaceutical interventions. These results are driven by cities in low- and middle-income countries, where overall economic activity is found to have been more strongly hit by the pandemic and the strength of those impacts was stronger for less densely populated cities. The role of population density in shaping the economic impacts of the Covid-19 crisis across cities is confirmed by an event-study analysis. Taken together, the findings suggest that the Covid-19 crisis gave rise to divergent urban economic trajectories, both between high- and lower-income countries and between cities with different population densities in lower-income countries.

We estimate the spatially heterogeneous effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on labor market dynamics in Germany until December 2021. While initially slightly stronger in rural regions and large agglomerations, adverse effects quickly become more pronounced and persistent in large agglomerations compared to all other region types. We ascribe the larger impact of the pandemic in large agglomerations to two factors. First, a combination of a higher share of skilled workers and jobs suitable for working from home is positively related to an increased inflow rate into unemployment. We argue that local spillover effects from reduced product market demand in large cities caused by changes in behavior such as working from home or online shopping are a possible explanation. Second, some of our results suggest that a lower outflow rate out of unemployment is associated with a higher precrisis unemployment rate in large agglomerations. This might reflect the less favorable composition of unemployment in large cities, which reduces the probability of transitions into employment during crises.

The ongoing global pandemic has brought into sharp relief the possible interactions between the epidemiology of a virus, the structure of the economy and society that becomes exposed to it, and the actions chosen by government, individuals, and communities to combat it or ameliorate its economic impact. Surprisingly, there has not been sufficient research on these economic and policy interactions of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic—the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century. This paper focuses on Japan, which as a minor participant of and was not directly affected by World War I. We exploit the diversity of experiences with the pandemic and its attendant policy responses across Japanese prefectures; and investigate the importance of the pandemic's toll (measured by excess mortality), and of nonpharmaceutical policy interventions (NPIs), in determining the pandemic's economic impact. We do so by focusing on the production and employment in the textile sector, given the availability of data and the general importance of the textile sector for emerging economies (as Japan was at the time). We find a significant adverse impact of the pandemic on textiles (almost 30% for an average prefectural excess mortality shock) and indeed find that the implemented NPIs were effective in ameliorating around one half of the pandemic's adverse economic consequences, especially for textile output (rather than employment). Furthermore, these NPIs were more effective when the excess mortality was higher. In this case, there was no trade-off between money and life, but rather the two were complimentary.

The road system built during the Roman Empire continues to have a significant impact on modern infrastructure in Italy. This paper examines the historical influence of Roman roads on the development of Italy's motorways and railways. The empirical analysis demonstrates how modern Italian transport infrastructure largely follows the path of the consular trajectories established by the network of Roman roads. These ancient roads, being paved and connecting the extremes of the Italian peninsula, have endured over time, serving as the foundational physical capital for the development of the current transport network. Overall, this research highlights the enduring legacy of the Roman road system and the robustness of Roman roads as an instrument in determining the causal effect of modern infrastructure.

The Tour de France (TdF) is one of the biggest and most recognized annual sporting events in the world. Cities and regions participate actively by hosting a stage start and/or finish, but it is unclear if there are place-based benefits from such local engagements. We estimate the direct and spatially indirect immediate regional benefits of hosting a TdF stage using monthly tourism data for French départements during 2011–2020. Our static and dynamic panel regressions indicate that hosting a TdF stage leads to significant increases in tourist arrivals and nights spent vis-à-vis similar départements not hosting a stage at the same time. Results are found to be robust when we run placebo tests, matching-based estimation to deal with regional heterogeneity and associated treatment endogeneity as well as spatially augmented estimations to account for interregional spillovers to départements not directly hosting a stage start/finish, for example, to those located along the route of a TdF stage. We use the obtained treatment estimates to discuss the regional economic impact of the TdF and their ramifications for tourism-based regional development and event management.

Westerlund O. (1997) Employment opportunities, wages and interregional migration in Sweden 1970–1989. Journal of Regional Science, 37(1):55–73. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4146.00043

In article title, word “International” is incorrect and the correct title should read:

Employment opportunities, wages and interregional migration in Sweden 1970–1989

We apologize for this error.

This paper examines the effects of COVID-19-induced lockdowns on recorded crime in England. The enforcement of lockdowns at both the national and local levels allows unveiling the impact on criminal activities by type of shutdown policy. Using official crime data across the universe of local authorities, we find that unlike local lockdowns national lockdowns significantly change the shape of recorded criminal activity, with the first nationally-imposed lockdown having the strongest impact. Findings also reveal that police operations play a prominent role in explaining changes in reported crimes. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that lockdowns reduced the economic costs of crime by £4.2 billion.

Using individual-level, geocode data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth's 1997 cohort, I ask whether business dynamism in local labor markets, defined as the rates of job creation and establishment entry, affects the location decisions of labor force participants, and I examine how effects differ for highly and less educated labor force participants. I find that a one standard deviation increase in business dynamism is associated with a 2%–4% increase in the probability a college graduate chooses a metropolitan statistical area and an 8%–15% decrease for high school graduates with no college experience. These results support recent findings documenting a decrease in responsiveness to local labor market conditions and suggest that incentivizing job creation in local labor markets may not be enough to offset the trend of declining internal migration in the United States.