Journal of Regional Science最新文献

We use the case of Chile to analyze the effectiveness of a spatially blind employment relief program (hereafter referred to as the LPE program) established by the Chilean government and implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chile is an interesting case because on the one hand its nonpharmaceutical interventions were spatially driven by health indicators based on small geographical areas; hence, producing sizeable regional and temporal variation of the local conditions induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the LPE program was designed and implemented nationally without distinction of local labor market or pandemic conditions, and each firm could decide whether to enroll in the program. By exploiting the spatial-temporal variation of exogenously imposed lockdowns and using a difference-in-differences panel data framework, we find that the LPE program was only effective for a group of regions in the country but, more importantly, that the LPE program was less effective during lockdowns. Moreover, the requirements of the LPE program were vague and did not target specific populations or entities. Consequently, our results suggest that women, informal and small firm workers, and most economic sectors throughout the country were less able to take advantage of the benefits of this program.

Populations are affected by shocks of different kinds, and wars, a priori, may be among the most prominent. This article studies the effect of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) shock on the distribution of population, especially on cities. One of the main contributions of this study is that it underlines the importance of distinguishing between winning and losing sides, an aspect which until now has been largely overlooked. While previous research on war shocks has also tended to be concerned with inter-state wars, this paper concentrates on a civil war. We take advantage of a new, long-term, annual data set. Our results show that, overall, the Spanish Civil War did not have a significant effect on city growth. However, we also find a significant and negative effect in the growth of cities that aligned themselves with the losing side. These results are robust to heterogeneity in the effect of the war shock, measured as war severity and duration. Although short lived, the temporary effect on growth results in a permanent effect on the size of cities on the losing side.

This paper provides evidence about location and colocation patterns of manufacturing entrepreneurship and spatial scope of agglomeration economies in the context of a developing country. Using microgeographic data for all Brazilian manufacturing activities and distance-based measures, we find clear patterns of colocalization between entrants and existing establishments, and that these patterns occur mainly at short distances. For activities presenting colocalization between entrants and existing establishments, our results also indicate that a greater number of incumbent establishments in a given location positively affects the number of entrant establishments that decide to locate there, an effect that attenuates rapidly with distance (generally disappearing after 5 km). This pattern of attenuation is robust to both the inclusion of a comprehensive set of controls for observable and unobservable local characteristics and the use of instrumental variables to address remaining endogeneity concerns.

We analyze the general equilibrium effects of an asymmetric decrease in transport costs, combining a large-scale spatial dynamic general equilibrium model for 267 European NUTS-2 regions with a detailed transport model at the level of individual road segments. As a case study, we consider the impact of the road infrastructure investments in Central and Eastern Europe of the European Cohesion Policy. Our analysis suggests that the decrease in transportation costs benefits the targeted regions via substantial increases in gross domestic product (GDP) and welfare compared to the baseline, and a small increase in population. The geographic information embedded in the transport model leads to relatively large predicted benefits in peripheral countries such as Greece and Finland, which hardly receive funds, but whose trade links cross Central and Eastern Europe, generating profit from the investments there. The richer, Western European nontargeted regions also enjoy a higher GDP after the investment in the East, but these effects are smaller. Thus, the policy reduces interregional disparities. There are rippled patterns in the predicted policy spillovers. In nontargeted countries, regions trading more intensely with regions where the investment is taking place on average benefit more compared to other regions within the same country, but also compared to neighboring regions across an international border. We uncover that regions importing goods from Central and Eastern Europe enjoy the largest spillovers. These regions become more competitive and expand exports, to the detriment of other regions in the same country.

The standard theory of optimal jurisdictional size hinges on the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods and services. However, despite its relevance for forced local amalgamation programs and related policies, the empirical evidence on the existence of such economies of scale remains elusive. The main goal of this paper is to produce an updated and comprehensive quantitative review of the existence of economies of scale in the provision of local public goods using a meta-analysis approach to systematize the wide range of empirical approaches and modeling frameworks found in the previous literature. Our analysis confirms the presence of moderately increasing to constant returns to scale in the provision of local services with no reduction in the average costs of production in the delivery of most local public services beyond a certain, modest jurisdictional size, which many studies have estimated at 10,000 residents. Also, the potential for economies of scale differs at least across three traditional services: education, water and sanitation, and garbage collection, being highest for education and lowest for garbage collection. Our analysis also offers guidelines for future empirical research in this area. Physical output and production cost data should be used, together with translog specifications for the modeling of cost functions. Last, we find evidence that the determinants of output cost elasticity include bidirectional publication bias and population density but do not include the presence or absence of modern “lean” production technologies or the (perceived) capital intensity of the sector, contrary to conventional wisdom. These findings have significant policy implications for countries considering jurisdictional consolidation programs.

We exploit the GEOSTAT 2011 population grid with a very high 1 km² resolution to document that Spain presents the lowest density of settlements among European countries. Only a small fraction of the Spanish territory is inhabited, particularly in its southern half, which goes hand in hand with a high degree of population concentration. We uncover through standard regression analysis and spatial regression discontinuity that this anomaly cannot be accounted for by adverse geographic and climatic conditions. The second part of the paper takes a historical perspective on Spain's settlement patterns by showing that the spatial distribution of the population has been very persistent in the last two centuries, and that the abnormally low density of settlements with respect to European neighbors was already visible in the 19th century, which indicates that this phenomenon has not emerged recently as a consequence of the transformations associated with industrialization and tertiarization. Using data on ancient sites, we find that Spain did not feature scarcity of settlements in comparison to other countries in premedieval times, suggesting that its current anomalous settlement pattern has not always existed and is, therefore, not intrinsic to its geography.

Environmental externalities of place-based policy have generally been overlooked despite their welfare consequences. This paper studies the air-pollution effect of development zones in urban China using a geo-coded data set of 2720 counties from 1998 to 2016. By adopting the generalized difference-in-difference framework to resolve the problem of endogenous locational selection for place-based policies, we find that development zones reduce ambient PM_2.5 concentration by around 1.8%, leading to a total social gain of $7.75 billion USD. The environmental benefit varies by the zone's dominant industry, geographical region, administrative affiliation and time of establishment. We further show that development zones are comparably cleaner due to the incentives of central and local governments, manifested by the desire to administratively promote development zones, the attempt to satisfy residential demands for higher quality-of-life cities, and the employment of the national environmental monitoring system.

We analyze the firm-level labor productivity growth returns of social capital—defined as a synthetic measure of “generalized trust,” “active participation,” and “social norms”—using a large sample of manufacturing firms in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. We find that firms' labor productivity growth is higher in areas with a better social capital endowment. The positive returns of social capital are, nevertheless, unevenly distributed across firms, with smaller, less productive, less capital-endowed, and low-tech firms benefitting the most from operating in strong social capital ecosystems.

Geographical distance constitutes friction in searching for research collaborators. Taking advantage of a quasinatural experiment featured by High-Speed Railway (HSR) lines in China, this paper employs the difference-in-differences model to identify the causal impact of a substantial improvement in the intercity transportation infrastructure on collaborative innovation across cities. The data pertain to a universe of patent applications filed by Chinese universities and their citations. We find that HSR contributes to a substantial increase in the innovation quantity and quality of collaborative patenting innovation between universities and corporates. It contributes to industry collaboration by utilizing university academic disciplines in the related technology fields. Lastly, HSR facilitates universities to search for new research partners with better quality beyond the geographical boundary.