Economics: Research Guide

We quantify blue economy contributions and analyze coast-hinterland economic interdependence through interregional linkages The study advances by adopting a multi-level approach, analyzing municipality and state-level data of ocean-related activities. Using an interstate input-output model, we estimate the blue economy’s value chains, enhancing our understanding of its systemic impacts. We address gaps in national, regional, and local blue economy assessments, providing insights for tailored policies in Brazil’s diverse coastal regions as Brazil aims for UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 by 2030. Our analysis underscores the diverse blue economy structure and regional disparities, advoc..

This paper aims to identify micro-level processes shaping the narratives about regional opportunity spaces. A process perspective is applied to investigate how place leaders engage in shaping narratives to influence the perception of regional opportunity spaces. The empirical research is based on a comparative case study of four peripheral regions in Germany including ninety-two interviews with regional stakeholders complemented by two cross-regional focus groups. Our findings emphasize the central role of place leadership in influencing the perception of regional opportunity spaces, show two pathways of changing dominant narratives (outside-in and inside-out) and provide a multiple-phase fr..

This paper delves into geographical agglomeration patterns of economic activities focusing on the connection between these agglomeration tendencies and sectoral patterns of innovative activities. Within a broad evolutionary perspective, we refine upon incumbent statistical models, trying to distinguish between intra- and inter-sectoral agglomerative forces, conditional on different types of sectoral innovative activities. Utilizing data spanning three distinct years, a decade apart, we investigate the systematic nature of spatial distributions, the relationship between agglomeration drivers and technological paradigms, and shifts in agglomerative tendencies over time. Our findings suggest th..

The study of agency has received increasing attention in recent years. The focus on change processes at the micro-level has brought new insights into the field of regional development. However, in debates about change and regional development, agents and leaders themselves have received far less attention than agency as a process. We provide an analytical model to show how political leaders and their leadership act as drivers of change through what we call actor properties (i.e., knowledge, networks and resources). We discuss how actor properties interact with the institutional context in which leaders operate and the various transitions from a political leader's legitimacy to the legacy of ..

Spatial inequality in economic outcomes is increasingly seen as a problem for national economies. This paper considers spatial inequality in the UK labour market, its causes, and potential policy solutions. Relative to other European countries, the UK is highly spatially uneven, but it is not as unequal as the United States. The most common explanations for growing spatial inequality are economic, in particular the linked processes of manufacturing decline, the rise in knowledge-based services, and London’s growth as an international service hub. However, these explanations ignore the importance of spatial labour market institutions on different local economies. In this paper we argue that..

With average temperature ranging from -20°C at the North Pole to 30°C at the Equator and with global warming expected to reach 1.4°C to 4.5°C by the year 2100, it is clear that climate change will have vastly different effects across the globe. Given the abundance of land in northern latitudes, if population and economic activity could freely move across space, the economic cost of global warming would be greatly reduced. But spatial frictions are real: migrants face barriers, trade and transportation are costly, physical infrastructure is not footloose, and knowledge embedded in clusters of economic activity diffuses only imperfectly. Thus, the economic cost of climate change is intimat..

In applied historical research, geographic units often differ in level of aggregation across datasets. One solution is to use crosswalks that associate factors located within one geographic unit to another, based on their relative areas. We develop an alternative approach based on relative populations, which accounts for heterogeneities in urbanization within counties. We construct population-based crosswalks for 1790 through 2020, which map county-level data across U.S. censuses, as well as from counties to congressional districts. Using official census data for congressional districts, we show that population-based weights outperform area-based ones in terms of similarity to official data.

While in recent times many regions have flourished, many others are stuck —or are at risk of becoming stuck— in a development trap. Such regions experience decline in economic growth, employment, and productivity relative to their neighbours and to their own past trajectories. Prolonged periods in development traps are leading to political dissatisfaction and unrest. Such discontent is often translated into support for anti-system parties at the ballot box. In this paper we study the link between the risk, intensity, and duration of regional development traps and the rise of discontent in the European Union (EU) —proxied by the support for Eurosceptic parties in national..

This study bridges the gap between the urban wage premium and human capital externalities. Merging the worker-level microdata with the geographical data in Mexico and taking the two-step approach of the Mincer wage equation, this study finds that the spatial sorting and human capital externalities entirely explain the urban wage premium in Mexico. This study finds heterogeneous effects of human capital externalities on wages between high- and low-skilled workers. Low-skilled workers benefit from human capital externalities, whereas high-skilled workers do not. Instead, high-skilled workers get more than twice as high private return to education anywhere they work as low-skilled workers.

This paper examines the UK implications for regional and national growth associated with different geographical investment patterns of publicly-funded R&D, in the light of the recommendations of the 2022 Levelling Up White Paper, aimed at balancing the national economy. The White Paper outlines twelve main "missions" focused on science, technology, and education to achieve this goal. One of these missions aims to increase domestic public Research and Development (R&D) by at least 40% outside the Greater South East (GSE) by 2030. We develop three scenarios based on different assumptions about extra R&D allocation. We use data from UKRI and ONS to determine the current distribution of R&D inve..

This paper examines how the shift towards working from home during and after the Covid-19 pandemic shapes the way how labor market and locality choices interact. For our analysis, we combine large administrative data on employment biographies in Germany and a new working from home potential indicator based on comprehensive data on working conditions across occupations. We find that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the distance between workplace and residence has increased more strongly for workers in occupations that can be done from home: The association of working from home potential and work-home distance increased significantly since 2021 as compared to a stable pattern before. The ..

Economists have long hypothesized that large and thick labor markets facilitate the matching between workers and firms. We use administrative data from the LEHD to compare the job search outcomes of workers originally in large and small markets who lost their jobs due to a firm closure. We define a labor market as the Commuting Zone×industry pair in the quarter before the closure. To account for the possible sorting of high-quality workers into larger markets, the effect of market size is identified by comparing workers in large and small markets within the same CZ, conditional on workers fixed effects. In the six quarters before their firm’s closure, workers in small and large markets ha..

Spatial differences in labor market performance are large and highly persistent. Using data from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we document striking similarities across these countries in the spatial differences in unemployment, vacancies, and job filling, finding, and separation rates. The novel facts on the geography of vacancies and job filling are instrumental in guiding and disciplining the development of a theory of local labor market performance. We find that a spatial version of a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model with endogenous separations and on-the-job search quantitatively accounts for all the documented empirical regularities. The model also quantitatively..

"In the year 2017, women needed an average of 11.6 minutes to commute from their place of residence to their place of work, whereas men needed an average of 13.4 minutes. Based on detailed geo-referenced data, we discuss selected dimensions underlying gender-specific differences in commuting behaviour. They cover socio-demographic characteristics, occupations, wages, and commuting patterns between and within urban and rural areas." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Economists are increasingly concerned with the heterogeneous impacts of transportation infrastructure investments on economic outcomes, particularly the phenomenon known as the gStraw Effect h: Core cities that were already in economic prosperity may gain more, and peripheral cities may lose, from large transportation projects. We empirically investigate whether such an effect manifests in the case of the Great Seto Bridges in Japan, a 70-billion-dollar project implemented as part of the gBuilding-a-new-Japan h initiative in the 1980s-1990s. We employ the recently developed recentered instrumental variable approach in the difference-in-differences design, exploiting the sharp decline in tran..

Policy networks are an important source of information for policy making. Yet, we have only a limited understanding of how policy networks are structured among innovation policy makers and which factors shape their structure. This paper studies how proximities can explain what drives the connections in policy networks. More specifically, we look at innovation policy networks between EU member states. We use social network analysis based on our own data to map the networks of the 28 EU innovation policy directors, consisting of 756 potential connections, and study the proximities shaping these networks. Geographical and cultural proximity turn out to be strong predictors for symmetric and asy..

Monitoring patterns of segregation and inequality at small area geographic levels is extremely costly. However, the increased availability of data through nontraditional sources such as satellite imagery facilitates this task. This paper assess the relevance of data from nightlight and day-time satellite imagery as well as building footprints and localization of points of interest for mapping variability in socioeconomic outcomes, i.e., household income, labor formality, life quality perception and household informality. The outcomes are computed at a granular level by combining census data, survey data, and small area estimation. The results reveal that non traditional sources are important..

Local governments have recently adopted place-based policies in order to revitalize decayed shopping areas in downtown areas. Developing a multipurpose shopping model, we quantitatively evaluate the welfare impacts of place-based policies for downtown retail agglomeration. In the model, retail stores are under monopolistic competition, and households are free to choose where to reside. Results show that, whether or not place-based policies are efficient depends on the recipients of government subsidies, even if the policies promote retail agglomeration in downtown areas. We show that the total benefits of location subsidies to households and location subsidies to stores are 566 and −342 mi..

For many years, public policies for territorial economic development have been inspired by symbols such as Silicon Valley, fueling the dreams of local elected officials. While evaluation processes allow us to assess the efficiency and ex-post performance of the territorial development paths taken, they do not provide a complete understanding of the mechanisms at work in their manufacture. This qualitative research focuses inductively on the genesis and evolution of Futuroscope, an emblematic and atypical figure in the development of a rural area, through a long-term case study. We therefore propose a secondary analysis in the form of a supra-analysis to clarify the mechanisms at work and to ..

Many countries are expected to face rapidly declining and aging populations. Meanwhile, urbanization continues worldwide, preserving the power law for city size distribution at the country level. We have developed a spatial statistical model based on the theory of economic agglomeration to predict the future geographic distribution of the population at the 1 km grid level. The model considers growth factors for cities and grids, while maintaining the power law for city size distribution at the country level. Japan is an ideal case study of a shrinking economy. It highlights the challenges that the rest of Asia and the world are likely to face. Cities in aging regions will decline more rapidl..

En este Documento de Trabajo se describe brevemente la última actualización de RegData, una base de datos que recoge los principales agregados económicos y demográficos de las regiones españolas durante las últimas seis décadas. This Working Paper provides a brief description of the latest update of RegData, a database that collects the main economic and demographic aggregates of Spanish regions over the last six decades.

This paper studies how demographics affect aggregate labor market power, the urban wage premium and the spatial concentration of population. I develop a quantitative spatial model in which labor market competitiveness depends on the demographic composition of the local workforce. Using highly disaggregated administrative data from Germany, I find that firms have more labor market power over older workers: The labor supply elasticity decreases from more than 2 to 1 from age 20 to 64. Calibrating the model with the reduced-form elasticity estimates, I find that differences in labor supply elasticities across age groups can explain 4% of the urban wage premium and 2% of the spatial concentratio..

This handbook chapter provides an essential introduction to the field of spatial econometrics, offering a comprehensive overview of techniques and methodologies for analysing spatial data in the social sciences. Spatial econometrics addresses the unique challenges posed by spatially dependent observations, where spatial relationships among data points can significantly impact statistical analyses. The chapter begins by exploring the fundamental concepts of spatial dependence and spatial autocorrelation, and highlighting their implications for traditional econometric models. It then introduces a range of spatial econometric models, particularly spatial lag, spatial error, and spatial lag of X..

We develop a novel methodology that uses machine learning to produce accurate estimates of consumption per capita and poverty in 10x10km cells in sub-Saharan Africa over time. Using the new data, we revisit two prominent papers that examine the effect of institutions on economic development, both of which use “nightlights” as a proxy for development. The conclusions from these papers are reversed when we substitute the new consumption data for nightlights. We argue that the different conclusions about institutions are due to a previously unrecognized problem that is endemic when nightlights are used as a proxy for spatial economic well-being: nightlights suffer from nonclassical measurem..

This paper considers a random search model where some locations provide sellers with better chances of meeting many buyers than other locations (for example popular shopping streets or the first page of a search engine). When sellers are heterogeneous in terms of the quality of their product and/or the probability that a given buyer likes their product, it is desirable that sellers of high-quality niche products sort into the best locations. We show that this does not always happen in a decentralized market. Finally, we allow for endogenous location distributions and show that more trades are realized when locations are similar (in which case the aggregate matching function is urn-ball) but ..

To investigate questions related to migration and trade, a model of regional or international development is created by altering Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) to include a labor market. The model is then applied to analyze poverty traps and the home market effect. We find that in the spatial economics context of migration but no trade, poverty can persist unless population in one region of many is pushed past a threshold. Then growth commences. In the context of trade but no migration, the home market effect holds for a range of parameters, similar to previous literature. However, unlike previous literature, we find that if populations in countries are highly asymmetric, the home market effect..

We describe and analyze the long-term development of self-employment in German regions between 1895 and 2019. Based on rankings ("league tables") for the two years we identify those regions where the relative level of self-employment significantly increased ('leapfroggers'), and those where the level of self-employment as compared to other regions deteriorated ('plungers'). Germany is a particularly interesting case due to the turbulent history of the country over the 20th century that includes two lost World Wars, occupation by foreign armies, forty years of division into a capitalist and a socialist state, as well as reunification and shock transformation of the eastern part to a market ec..

Using structural impact analysis, this research investigates the economic implications of road transport infrastructure investments on the Latin American Integration Route (LAIR) in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (MS), Brazil. We aim to determine whether these investments can drive short-term local economic growth, identify sectors that benefit the most from the investments, and analyze the distribution of effects among MS municipalities. Based on three comparative scenario simulations, the findings indicate that infrastructure investments are likely to yield positive short-term impacts on MS's GDP. The intensity of these impacts varies across industries and municipalities, with Campo Grand..

Over the last 50 years, nations worldwide have established higher education institutions to stimulate local economic growth. However, empirical evidence on local economic outcomes is still scarce, mainly because of a lack of adequate data. This paper provides evidence on the expansion of branch campuses in Tennessee and Texas, two states that are representative of the underlying patterns in the U.S. as a whole. As we expect the economic effect to be very localized, we use a novel and highly disaggregated proxy for regional economic activity based on daytime satellite imagery. Applying three panel estimation methods - traditional difference-in-differences (DD), heterogeneity-robust DD, and in..

A few large firms dominate many local labor markets. This leaves workers vulnerable to firm-specific shocks. If one firm has a bad productivity shock in a small market, workers will be stuck with that unproductive employer, while in a large labor market, workers can move to another firm. Building on that insight, we present a model of local labor markets with a finite number of firms subject to idiosyncratic shocks. We show that there are increasing returns to scale which disappear as the number of firms goes to infinity. We also show that there can be under-entry of firms, especially in small markets. We then test the main mechanism in Japanese administrative data. We first confirm that pay..