Download or read book Essays on the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities written by Yi Jie Gwee and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine the spatial distribution of economic activities. The first chapter examines how disasters as well as individuals' expectations of what others will do affect the development of cities. The development of cities often involves the rejuvenation or replacement of existing structures. However, history, in the form of the sunk cost of existing durable structures, often serves as an impediment to urban development. In theory, by reducing the opportunity cost of waiting to rebuild to zero, disasters can eliminate these frictions and bring about higher quality structures. In addition, the simultaneous rebuilding after a disaster would allow property owners to experience stronger cross-building spillovers which would encourage further upgrades of nearby buildings. Nevertheless, these are not sufficient to guarantee higher quality buildings. This is because individuals' investment decisions also depend on their expectations of what others will do.

Download or read book Essays on Environment and the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activities written by Chunhua Wang and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental quality and the spatial distribution of economic activities affect each other in many ways. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to understanding the complex interrelationship and its policy implications. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines the roles that locational amenities and increasing returns to scale play in the formation of urban development patterns and regional economic growth. The spatial distribution of amenities is shown to be a major determinant; and the effects of amenities are reinforced by external scale economies and localized information spillovers, both of which promote agglomeration and human capital accumulation. Workers in amenity locations are more productive because of increasing returns, which encourage investment on human capital development. The decentralized equilibrium is not optimal because of the externalities associated with human capital investments. The efficiency can be improved by public policies encouraging human capital investments. Such policies also increase the number and size of cities and the pace of urbanization and economic growth. The second essay examines the effects of natural disasters on population growth across U.S. counties during the period of 1960-2000. Results suggest that except earthquakes and most serious hurricanes, the risks of natural disasters have no statistically significant effects on population growth. We also estimate the effects of natural disasters on county socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, including human capital, age and ethnic composition of population, industrial composition, and income inequality, which correlate with county population growth. The insignificance of those effects indicates that natural disasters have no indirect effects on population growth, either. The third essay considers the roles of mandatory building codes for regulating land development in a natural disaster-prone area as self-insurance and self-protection. To find the optimal building codes, a simple urban economics model is constructed for the analysis. A number of comparative statics results are presented to describe how optimal building codes are affected by the endowed probability of the disaster, the expected loss, productivity levels of self-insurance and self-protection, and socioeconomic characteristics of the area such as wage, population, and the share of land area in the risky region.

Download or read book The Bases of Economic Geography written by Ronald R. Boyce and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Size Distribution of Cities written by Hiroki Watanabe and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation is comprised of three essays that analyze the spatial distribution of people and economic activities from three distinct perspectives. Chapter 1: Explaining the Size Distribution of Cities: X-treme Economies. The empirical regularity known as Zipf's law or the rank-size rule has motivated development of a theoretical literature to explain it. We examine the assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity shocks, implicitly used in this literature. With either self insurance or insurance markets, and either an arbitrarily small cost of moving or the assumption that consumers do not perfectly observe the shocks to firms' technologies, the agents will never move. Even without these frictions, our analysis yields another equilibrium with insurance where consumers never move. Thus, insurance is a substitute for movement. We propose an alternative class of models, involving extreme risk against which consumers will not insure. Instead, they will move, generating a Fréchet distribution of city sizes that is empirically competitive with other models. (Forthcoming at Quantitative Economics. Based on joint work with Professor Marcus Berliant) Chapter 2: A Scale-Free Network Structure Explains the City-Size Distribution. Zipf's law is one of the best-known empirical regularities in urban economics. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination of an asymmetric transport network. In a scale-free network, the chance of observing extremes in network connections becomes higher than the Gaussian distribution predicts and therefore it explains the emergence of large clusters. The city-size distribution shares the same pattern. This paper decodes how accessibility of a city to other cities on the transportation network can boost its local economy and explains the city-size distribution as a result of its underlying transportation network structure. (Based on joint work with Professor Marcus Berliant) Chapter 3: A Spatial Production Economy Explains Gross Metropolitan Product. It has long been known that the city-size distribution is fat tailed, drawing the interest of urban economists. In contrast, not much is known about the distribution of GDP at city level (henceforth referred to as gross metropolitan product, GMP). We build a model of the spatial economy that includes production and confirm the following empirical facts about the GMP counterpart of the city-size distribution. First, both Zipf's and Gibrat's law hold for the distribution of GMP as well. In particular the GMP distribution is well-traced by a lognormal distribution. Second, citywide aggregate production exhibits increasing returns to scale with respect to employment. In particular a 1% increase in employment leads to a 1.117% (or 1.180% in theory) increase in GMP. Agglomeration economies are explained as a result of an endogenous trade-off between externalities and land consumption of consumers.

Download or read book Spatial Regional and Population Economics written by Mark Perlman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1972. Hoover’s first publication, his doctoral dissertation, set the stage for a life-long preoccupation with spatial economics from when it was a relatively new field. His work developed the subject and lead him into the area of regional economics, in which he became well known for his contributions to the New York Metropolitan Region Study. In this book his colleagues and a host of former students and admirers present chapters written within his areas of interest in honor of his work, at the end of his academic career, during which he mostly taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh.

Download or read book Essays on the Spatial Distribution of Population and Employment written by Nathaniel Baum-Snow and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Spatial Economics written by Motoaki Takahashi and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two chapters, both of which address the geographic distribution of economic activity. In the United States, four million African Americans migrated from the South to the North between 1940 and 1970. Chapter 1 studies the effects of this great Black migration on aggregate US output and the welfare of African Americans and others. For this purpose, I develop and quantify a dynamic general equilibrium model of the spatial economy in which cohorts of African Americans and others migrate across locations. I compare the baseline equilibrium matched with US data from 1940 to 2010 with counterfactual equilibria in which African Americans or others cannot relocate across the North and the South between 1940 and 1970. The mobility of African Americans and others increased aggregate output by 0.7 and 0.3 percent, respectively. Although African Americans accounted for about 10 percent of the US population, their relocation impacted the aggregate economy more than the relocation of the other 90 percent did. The mobility of African Americans induced a large increase in the welfare of African Americans in the South, a small decrease in the welfare of African Americans in the North, and little change in the welfare of others. Chapter 2 studies the effect of a productivity change in a foreign country on unemployment across US states. I develop a model of involuntary unemployment in multiple geographic locations. The model merges a quantitative general equilibrium model of international trade and spatial economy and the efficiency-wage model (Shapiro and Stiglitz, 1984). I quantify it for 27 countries and 50 US states and compute the counterfactual of the 5% increase in China's productivity. The model predicts that real wages increase in all the US states, but unemployment increases in 44 states, and the overall US welfare increases. The counterfactual result highlights heterogeneous effects of foreign shocks on unemployment and real wages across the US states.

Download or read book The Changing Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity Across US Countries written by Klaus Desmet and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Economic Geography written by Susana Iranzo and published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial economics gained importance in the 1990s when the "new economic geography" brought traditional questions from the urban/regional literature into mainstream economics. This book develops and empirically tests models to better understand the determinants of economic activity at three different geographical levels: urban, regional and national. The first essay examines the ability of public policies to alter the market outcome of economic agglomeration, and assesses the effects on employment of the Structural Funds, the main instrument of the European regional policy, during 1994-99. The second essay studies the relation between wages and the distribution of skills in American cities, and finds that not only the average level of skills matters but also their distribution. The third essay looks at the different choice of FDI mode of entry across foreign investors into U.S. manufacturing. The book should be useful to academics interested in the geographical implications of the phenomena of trade liberalization, the multinationality of the firm and the new ways of organizing production, as well as to policy makers working on the design of regional and industrial policies.

Download or read book Essays on Economic Geography and Networks written by Yuhei Miyauchi and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters that analyze how the networks of firms, people, and locations shape socio-economic activities. The first chapter analyzes the role of supplier to buyer matching in the firm-to-firm trade as a source of geographic concentration of economic activities. Using a panel of firm-to-firm trade data covering over a million Japanese firms, I first provide evidence that the new supplier matching rate upon unexpected supplier bankruptcies increases in locations and industries when there are more alternative suppliers selling in the buyer's location, while this rate remains stable in the presence of other buyers looking for a match. I then estimate a new structural trade model that incorporates dynamic firm-to-firm matching across space in a standard Melitz model and concludes that this agglomeration mechanism drives a large part of spatial inequality of firm density and real wages in Japan. The second chapter (co-authored with Gabriel Kreindler) investigates how people's mobility patterns are associated with urban spatial economic activities. We use cell phone transaction data to extract commuting flows at a fine spatially and temporarily scale, and use a model to empirically associate commuting flows with spatial economic activity distributions in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We validate our predicted measures of economic activities with a government survey and show several applications to provide a proof of concept of our approach. The third chapter develops an econometric framework to estimate structural parameters underlying a network formation model. I show that the set of equilibria is a complete lattice under certain conditions, and extend this characterization to an econometric framework based on the moment inequality model. I then apply this method to a student friendship network formation in the U.S.

Download or read book The Changing Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity Across U S Counties written by Klaus Desmet and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Spatial Econometrics Application in Study of Conflict and Economic Activity written by Ahmed Sadek Yousuf and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial interaction and the locational structure between observations as well as availability of satellite derived data has meant a richer and more exhaustive exploration of topics relevant in development topics, particularly in areas of subnational economic activity and conflict. This research leverages thus spatial econometric techniques to dynamically decompose impacts from socio-economic determinants on conflict incidence (with setting in Sub-Saharan Africa). Later I also present a statistical framework (based on extension of Henderson's approach (2012)) to augment official income figures at district / county level with multiple satellite derived signals, with specific context given to developing countries. In the first chapter, I look at the relationship and interplay between conflict intensity, foreign aid (in the form of geocoded World Bank Aid allocations) and economic activity (proxied by Sum of Lights, SOL, as gathered from satellite night lights sources), at the sub-national (provincial) level in Sub-Saharan Africa over 2000-13, using a Panel Vector Autoregression approach based on a multi-stage Continuous Updated Estimator GMM estimation strategy, and incorporating spatial effects amongst the concerned variables as well as in the model disturbances. I then decompose the derived impulse responses from this system into spatial direct and indirect responses. As per the findings, conflict intensity reacts (largely) positively to negative shocks in economic activity and World Bank Aid, with evidence of persistent spillover effects stemming from these aforementioned shocks. In the second chapter, following on from the first chapter, I specifically look at the impact of income inequality, derived from the spatial distribution of night lights raster and population raster data, on conflict incidence in Sub-Saharan Africa, using a Spatial Exponential Feedback Model approach (as opposed to the more standard Linear Feedback Model in the literature), based on Empirical Likelihood estimation. I also derive spatial direct and indirect impacts from changes in inequality, with direct responses fully dying away within 5 years while indirect response has an extent of in-built persistence. Thus, this chapter adds to the existing literature on conflict and income inequality by exploring the spatial dimension of the dynamics at play. Lastly, in the third chapter, a modified statistical method is presented, based on Henderson et al. (2012) where he looked at augmenting official national income growth measures by using satellite data on night lights. In the approach as presented here, a Method of Moments approach is introduced so as use multiple satellite signals, in addition to night lights, to augment income growth data at sub-national level. The two other signals are spread of non-vegetative cover and urban land cover data (derived from European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative Land Cover raster products). Three countries were studied with this approach: India, Indonesia and the U.S.

Download or read book Infrastructure and the Space Economy written by Karin Peschel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Festschrift is dedicated to ROLF FUNCK on occasion of his 60th birthday on February 7, 1990. It was a wholehearted desire of the authors who all are obliged to ROLF FUNCK in their research work to please and to honour him and to express their deep gratitude. I gladly took the initiative of preparing this Festschrift since I have been closely associated with ROLF FUNCK for many years of his academic life. We first met in 1958 when he was Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) and I was student at the University of Munster. A few years later, when ROLF FUNCK, still very young, moved to the University of Karlsruhe as Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Economic Policy and Research, he offered me the opportunity of working with him and this started a long period of successful scientific collaboration. Nowadays we meet only occasionally at conferences, in committees etc. , but I always recall with pleasure the warm-hearted and stimulating atmosphere he created at his In stitute in Karlsruhe. I express my thanks to the authors and to the publisher, the Springer Verlag, for their cooperation as well as to the sponsors who provided the necessary funds for the publication of this Festschrift. For her enthusiasm in compiling and processing the articles on the PC and producing the final draft I am indebted to Mrs. Ilona Lohr.

Download or read book Essays in Spatial Economics written by Antoine Boris Levy and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is composed of three essays, showing how nationwide economic causes exert distinct local and aggregate effects across regions, depending on the geographic distribution of exposure to these common shocks, and on spatial interactions between locations. The first chapter, building upon administrative data covering the universe of dwellings in France, documents the presence of home bias in investment (a negative effect of distance for individual investors' lumpy portfolio allocation decisions). I explore its consequences for the equilibrium supply of housing, in a spatial equilibrium framework combined with a frictional portfolio choice. Using quasi-experimental evidence from a location-specific French investment tax credit targeted at individual landlords, I evidence a substantial causal impact on transactions, new construction, investor returns, and inwards migration. Long-distance individual investor involvement rises in treated cities, and the policy has stronger effects in locations more open to outside capital. "The second chapter, in collaboration with Jacob Moscona, studies how exogenous differences in local population density lead regions to specialize in different kind of manufacturing industries. We show theoretically and empirically that a country's economic geography -- in particular, the distribution of population across space -- is an important source of comparative advantage, as countries with higher population-weighted population density specialize in sectors that benefit from agglomeration. After estimating substantial variation within the US in the extent to which manufacturing sectors sort into dense locations, we find that countries with higher population-weighted density disproportionately export in sectors with high "density affinity"." The third chapter explores electoral behavioral with regionally differentiated exposure to common campaign pledges. Using quasi-random spatial variation across municipalities, and an instrumental variables strategy exploiting formulaic real estate assessments established in the 1970s, I show that a promise to repeal a broad-based housing tax accounted for a substantial share of Emmanuel Macron's electoral success in the 2017 French presidential election. In high-frequency data, the timing of the promise coincided with a significant increase in voter information search, in Macron's polling intentions, and in his market-based predicted chances of victory. The results evidence the crucial role of spatial distributive policies, even in elections marked by ideological polarization around non-economic issues.

Download or read book Regional Economic Development written by Benjamin Higgins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1988. Leading international researchers in regional economic development have contributed an integrated set of chapters reviewing the whole field and taking stock of current thinking. The book is in honour of François Perroux, the father of regional development theory, whose contributions to two important concepts in economics – time and space – have been substantial. The book comprises five parts. Part one covers Perroux's work in general and on growth poles in particular. Part two deals with 'the politics of place', population and regional development, techniques for regional policy analysis and a neoclassical approach to regional economics. In part three the Canadian scene is reviewed at national and regional levels. In part four chapters on urban development, small and medium-size cities, and capital grants deal with the experiences of other countries. Part five concludes the book with a chapter on growth poles, optimal size of cities, and regional disparities and government intervention.

Download or read book Spatial Dynamics written by Michael L. Chohaney and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is concerned with the spatial dynamics of the U.S. economy. Spatial dynamics is a term coined in this dissertation to define the geo-spatial aspects of an observed natural process, particularly changes in its spatial relations over time. Geographic inquiry considering spatial dynamics requires an unassuming examination of spatial panel data, an approach that facilitates the discovery of new regularities and tendencies in spatial data and necessitates the development of more flexible tools and methods tailored to the peculiarities of the observed natural process. This dissertation demonstrates the practicality of spatial dynamics as a promising framework with the discovery, description, and analysis of two spatial economic paradoxes, which impelled the creation of several new tools and methods. The dissertation is composed of three essays linked by the exploration and analysis of the spatial dynamics of the U.S. economy, specifically its metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). The first essay develops two new statistics that quantify physical and human capital accumulation in MSAs. These statistics are used to calculate the classical production function and derive the percent contribution of physical and human capital to average establishment size and Gross Domestic Product by MSA (MGDP). The results conform to macroeconomic expectations and are spatially distributed according to the familiar economic geography of the United States, rendering the statistics useful for spatial economic analysis. The second essay explores the observation that MGDP growth rates are spatially clustered and MGDP levels are uniformly distributed (i.e., exhibit no spatial correlation). This finding is paradoxical because the level of economic activity is the aggregation of previous growth patterns and, if economic growth in the spatial economy is persistently clustered, the location of economic activity should follow the same pattern. The essay seeks to solve this puzzle using the classical production function, analyzing the relationship between the MGDP growth rates and changes in local levels of physical and human capital accumulation. Interestingly, however, MGDP growth and decline are observed to sporadically cluster in annually changing patterns, violating the spatial panel data model assumption of constant spatial relations; thus, an alternative, dynamic spatial structure was created to model the unidentified spatial growth pattern. This dynamic spatial structure successfully redefined spatial dependence and statistically outperformed competing conventional aspatial and spatial panel data models. The parameter estimates exposed the paradox; sporadic MGDP growth and decline patterns are driven by continually changing levels of physical capital accumulation. The ability of local physical capital investments to promote or prohibit growth is generated by an unexplained spatial economic process that results in practically all MSAs experiencing years when physical capital investments induce and inhibit economic growth; thus, local economic growth sporadically clusters in fluctuating distributions that accumulate into spatially uncorrelated levels of economic activity. The third essay entails the discovery and analysis of another curious empirical regularity: The existence of a persistent asymmetric relationship between the spatial dependence of MGDP growth rates and rate of national GDP growth. Specifically, the essay provides evidence of a strong negative statistical correlation between GDP growth rates and the intensity of spatial dependence produced by economically declining MSAs, and a lack of statistically significant relationship between GDP growth and the spatial dependence of economically expanding MSAs. The supposition of motivating this essay is that insights into this puzzling asymmetric relationship can be obtained by analyzing the spatial arrangement of the high and low growth clusters. High and low growth clusters were distinguished according to the two geographic arrangements that produce spatial dependence, the size and quantity of clusters. Our analysis of these characteristics indicate that declining MSAs geographically concentrate into more extensive contiguous clusters as GDP declines; however, high growth MSAs do not spatially cluster in any particular manner. This suggests that the immediate spatial spillover effects caused by adverse economic circumstances are strong enough to depress aggregate economic outcomes, but spatial spillovers caused by favorable economic circumstances do not produce a significant immediate impact on the national economy. Further, we found that the arrangement of high and low growth clusters are statistically significantly different, which suggests that regional growth and decline are distinct spatial economic processes.

Download or read book The Selected Essays of John H Dunning written by John H. Dunning and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These volumes should be required reading for anyone with an interest in international business and globalisation. They add immeasurably to our understanding. Mira Wilkins, Business History Dunning is one of the most prominent researchers and thinkers in the IB field. In these books, he has set out his most celebrated writings and has provided us relatively easy access to widely scattered references in the literature. Rajat Kathuria, Global Business Review The modern academic study of the multinational enterprise started with John Dunning s pioneering study of American Investment in British Manufacturing Industry in 1958. In the early 1970s he began to publish an influential and authoritative stream of papers integrating theoretical and empirical analysis of the multinational enterprise. This fascinating volume charts the evolution of John Dunning s thinking, highlighting his attempts to develop a richer, more dynamic and historical framework for the analysis of the multinational enterprise. It makes compelling reading, and offers unique insights into the intellectual development of his well-known eclectic paradigm of international production. Mark Casson, University of Reading, UK This volume contains a selection of John Dunning s best known and highly acclaimed writings on the theory of international business activity. Spanning more than three decades, the 16 contributions trace the evolution of his thoughts and ideas as an economist, from his first article on the determinants of international production, published in 1973, to his most recent essay on relational assets, networks and global business activity, completed in 2002. Theories and Paradigms of International Business Activity gives particular prominence to the author s much renowned eclectic paradigm, which he first promulgated at a Nobel Symposium on the international allocation of economic activity in 1976. Since then, the author has written over 60 articles, pamphlets and chapters in books which have extended, refined and updated his theorizing on the interface between trade, FDI and MNE activity, in the light of the changing characteristics of the world economy and advances in international business scholarship. This, the first of two volumes of John Dunning s work, is essential reading for all students, scholars and researchers with a special interest in the reasons behind the explosive growth in post-war FDI and the globalization of business activity.