AbstractPubs in Britain are closing at a rapid rate. While changing regulatory, demographic and consumer trends have weakened the viability of pubs businesses in recent years, less is known about the role of Pub Companies, or ‘pubcos’, in contributing to the decline of the sector. Reflecting the core elements of financialization, pubcos acquire assets through securitization, prioritize shareholder

We estimate the effect of public transport supply on travel times of motor-vehicle and bus users in Rome, Italy. We apply a quasi-experimental methodology exploiting hourly information on public transport service reductions during strikes. We find that a 10-percentage point reduction in public transit supply increases the travel time of motor-vehicles by about 1.6% in the morning peak. The effect on

This paper examines the impact of housing supply elasticity on urban development. Using data for a sample of roughly one hundred Italian main cities observed over 40 years, we first estimate housing supply elasticities at the city level, measured as the correlation between the changes in the housing stock and in the house prices. Second, we show that differences in the elasticity of housing supply

This article investigates the legacy of ancient Phoenician, Greek and Etruscan colonialism in shaping the economic geography of the Mediterranean region. Utilising historical data on ancient colonies and current data on population density and night light emissions (as a proxy for economic activity), we find that geographical areas colonised by these ancient civilisations have higher population density

AbstractIn this paper, we document border effects in the award of public contracts in the European single market. We use a dataset of 1.8 million contract awards, which we match to geolocations to estimate a gravity model of procurement flows between European NUTS3 region pairs. We find very sizable cross-national border effects for all types of goods and services, even after controlling for physical

This article explores whether increasing fossil fuel divestment commitments are related to the reduction of capital flows into the oil and gas sector, based on an analysis of syndicated lending, equity and bond underwriting across 33 countries from 2000 to 2015. We find that increasing oil and gas divestment pledges in a country are associated with lower capital flows to domestic oil and gas companies

AbstractThis article investigates the link between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and employment in their host regions by cross-fertilising the literature on MNE externalities with the emerging body of research on industrial relatedness. The link between employment and MNE presence in the same and related industries is tested for European regions. The results suggest that cross-sectoral MNE spillovers

This article studies the persistence of a large, unexpected and regionally very unevenly distributed population shock, the inflow of eight million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II. Using detailed census data from 1939 to 1970, we show that the shock proved persistent within local labor markets, but was largely reversed between labor markets. These results show that

Recently, economic geographers have sought to account for how regional and national initiatives shape the strategic decisions of actors in global production networks (GPNs). In this article, I intend to discuss the political and institutional dynamics by which GPNs evolve, and the capacity of states to shape emerging organizational and spatial arrangements in dynamic GPNs. Building on assemblage thinking

This article examines how human capital portability frictions affect the quantity and the quality of international student migration (ISM). Using administrative data on college enrolment in Spain, it evaluates a reform that lifted the requirement to take the Spanish end-of-high-school exam for foreign students from a subset of countries. The reform increased student migration from treated countries

We examine the impact of household mortgages on house prices. Using biannual data on Italian cities in the period 2003–2015, we build an exogenous and fully data-driven indicator of mortgage supply stance and use it as instrument for actual extended mortgages. Our results indicate that mortgages have a positive and significant causal effect on house prices, with an estimated elasticity of around 0

We build a tractable model of frictional labor markets and segmented housing markets to study welfare effects of regulations, including spatial misallocation and deviation from competitive pricing of rents. The model is summarized by a labor demand curve depending on rents and wages, a wage curve reflecting labor market tightness and rents, and finally a rent curve reflecting employment. In this economy

This article analyzes the geographic clustering of crowdfunding (CF) activity across two countries at the city level. We find that the ability of Kickstarter projects to attract funding or backers is spikier than the simple number of projects, suggesting that while the locations of Kickstarter projects are not as clustered, projects that are able to recruit funding are clustering. In addition, we find

This article considers the heterogeneous microfoundations of agglomeration economies. It studies the co-location of industries to look for evidence of labour pooling, input sharing and knowledge spillovers. The novel contribution of the article is that it estimates single-industry models using a common empirical framework that exploits the cross-sectional variation in how one industry co-locates with

Using longitudinal data from Burundi, we explore the consequences of refugee repatriation for stayee households in a context in which returnees faced restrictions on economic activities and mobility while abroad. We use geographical features of the receiving communities, including altitude and distance to the border, for identification. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the local share

Journal of Economic Geography 2020, 20, 249–291; doi:10.1093/jeg/lby022

Journal of Economic Geography 2019, doi:10.1093/jeg/lbz022

The present paper explores a historical case of a location where a group of merchant families established powerful positions over many generations, involving both the international trade of fine wine and human beings sold as slaves. These families lived in Bordeaux, one of the largest trading centers for trade of enslaved humans in the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These trading

This article presents a postcolonial analysis of financial citizenship (FC) programmes in Malaysia. Drawing on secondary data and on interviews with elites and citizen investors, the paper explores the spatial and historically specific nature of financialisation in a postcolonial context. Specifically, the paper draws out the significance of FC as part of broader nation building objectives in Malaysia

We adapt the product-space approach of Hausmann–Hidalgo et al. to the case of Italian provinces, examining the extent to which network connectedness and centrality of a province’s exports is related to its economic performance. We construct a new Product Space Position (PSP) index which retains many of the Hausmann–Hidalgo et al. features but which is also much better suited to handling regional and

We investigate whether plants inside and outside geographic clusters differ in their resilience to adverse economic shocks. To this end, we develop a bottom-up procedure to delimit clusters using Canadian geo-coded plant-level data. Focusing on the textile and clothing (T&C) sector and exploiting the series of dramatic changes faced by that sector between 2001 and 2013, we find little evidence that

This article examines whether localized clusters of similar industries produce agglomeration economies in the formal and informal sectors. We develop a Bayesian method to estimate a spatial autoregressive model with an endogenous independent variable. We use establishment-level census data that cover both formal registered and informal unregistered establishments in Cambodia. We find that the density

What forces drive regional economic divergence? This study identifies colonial-era missions as an institutional force in shaping economic relations in Ghana. We conceptualize Christian missions as an institution, in its solid form, as the educational infrastructure and trade networks developed, and in its formal form, as advancing new rules that governed cultural and trade development. We use survey

We estimate the heterogeneous impact of the scale, composition and consumer good effect of ethnic diversity on individuals’ job and residential location. Using an extensive pooled micro panel data set in which homeowners in the Netherlands are identified in both the housing and labor market, we can derive the combined effect of ethnic diversity in both markets. We test a model that integrates the utility

Business location and relocation decisions tend to favor urban areas over rural areas, mainly due to the benefits derived from agglomeration economies. However, recent data from the USA show that rural counties have attracted some businesses from urban counties. This is the first study to focus on these relocations and to explore what locational factors drive these migration flows. We pay specific

We study the effect of railway access on population growth in 19th century Switzerland. Our analysis is based on geo-referenced railway network information and an inconsequential units IV approach. Gaining direct railway access increased annual population growth by 0.4 percentage points, while municipalities in close vicinity but no direct access (i.e. 2–10 km distance) experienced a growth slump of

This paper develops a model to study the impact of trade costs on developing countries’ industrialization when sequential production is networked in global value chains (GVCs). In a two-country setting, a decrease in trade costs of intermediates is associated with South joining and moving up the value chain and both North and South experiencing a welfare improvement. The wage gap between North and

The article studies the impact of a switch from free to charged highway provision on firm numbers and private sector employment in a panel of Portuguese municipalities covering the period 2007–2013. It exploits the fact that tolls on certain highways in Portugal were unexpectedly introduced in reaction to the sovereign debt crisis to establish causality. Findings suggest that the price of highway tolls

While there is abundant evidence demonstrating that residents permanently migrate in search of locations with cleaner air, there are considerably fewer studies that investigate if travellers also take short-term trips to reduce their exposure to air pollution. In this study, we use a complete dataset of flights at Beijing International Airport to investigate if travel patterns are indeed correlated

This study examines the effects of China’s industrial clusters on regional economic growth and urban–rural income inequality within a region. A density-based index (DBI) is developed to capture the unique features of cluster development in China. From a county-level DBI panel data constructed based on firm- and county-level datasets, we find that clusters enhance local economic growth substantially

In this article, we argue that entrepreneurship is a socio-spatial embedded activity and that the social construction of gender, time, space, economy and culture is manifest in the masculinities that are ascribed a normative role in entrepreneurship development policies. Drawing on feminist approaches to articulate and perform resistance to the hegemonic ‘masculinist’ discourses on entrepreneurship

In this article, we study the effect of airports on local economic performance that arises from better access to domestic markets in the context of China’s recent airport network expansion. We measure access through the changes in network closeness centrality implied by the contraction in potential journey times between counties within China. Our key finding is that better access—primarily due to landside

I aim to identify the presence of spatial interactions among local governments by exploiting a novel strategy. Specifically, I take advantage of the political cycle of Italian municipalities over the period of 2001–2011 to isolate the effect of the spending decisions of one municipality on neighboring municipalities. The results of this analysis point to the presence of strategic interactions between

I analyze whether variation in rainfall risk played a role for the speed of the demographic transition among American settlers. The underlying hypothesis is that children constituted a buffer stock of labor that could be mobilized in response to income shocks. Identification relies on fertility differences between farm and non-farm households within counties and over time. The results suggest that

Larger cities typically give rise to two opposite effects: tougher competition among firms and higher production costs. Using an urban model with substitutability of production factors and pro-competitive effects, I study product market responses to an increase in city population, land-use regulations and commuting costs. I show that those responses depend on the land intensity in production. If the

We examine the effect of changes in skilled-immigrant population shares in 98 Canadian cities on per capita patents. The Canadian case is of interest because its ‘points system’ is viewed as a model of skilled immigration policy. Our estimates suggest that the impact of increasing the university-educated immigrant share on patenting rates is modest at best and unambiguously smaller than the impact

We analyze occupational polarization within and across firms using a census of matched employer–employee panel data from Finland in the period of 2000–2014. As in most industrialized countries, the Finnish occupational distribution has polarized over the last decades. Using decomposition analysis, we find that jobs involving low-level service tasks increase mostly through the entry dynamics, while

Research on labour governance actors in global production networks (GPNs) has been limited to civil society organisations, firms and governments. Understanding the influence of actors in GPNs has been dealt with singular and overt modes of relational power. This paper contributes to both debates by examining an intermediary actor—the social auditing organisation Verite—and its exercise of multiple

This article builds an understanding of regional innovation specialisation by developing a multi-sector model with endogenous growth through quality improving innovations and spillovers from related technologies. The model provides an approach to incorporate the relatedness literature within the mainstream theoretical frameworks of endogenous growth and economic geography. Each firm’s technology sector

Are cross-border workers responsive to changes in the exchange rate between the home and host countries’ currencies? I answer this question by examining the effects of the appreciation of the Swiss franc (CHF) relative to the euro (EUR) on labour supply decisions of Italian cross-border workers. I use hourly data on traffic flows in Ticino, the southernmost canton of Switzerland, together with three

Migration restrictions are a hotly debated topic in the current refugee crisis in Europe. This paper investigates the long-term effect of a restrictive migration policy on regional development. The analysis is based on the large-scale expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe after World War II (WWII). Expellees were not allowed to resettle in the French occupation zone in the first years

We study the effect of natural disasters on port level exports. We model the interaction between firms and ports to study how strongly exports from one port are affected by changes in the cost of exporting at neighboring ports. We extend the standard trade model with heterogeneous firms to a multiple port structure where exporting is subject to port specific local transportation costs, port specific

In this framing paper for the special issue, we map significant research on global production networks during the past decade in economic geography and adjacent fields. In line with the core aim of the special issue to push for new conceptual advances, the paper focuses on the central elements of GPN theory to showcase recent rethinking related to the delimiting of global production networks, underlying

Education The Finnish education system consists of basic education in comprehensive schools for the whole age group (nine years); upper secondary education, comprising general and vocational education and training (usually three years); and higher education at a university or a polytechnic (also known as universities of applied sciences). Our first measure of educational attainment is an indicator

This paper assesses the impact on neighborhood population dynamics of a major urban renewal policy implemented in Catalonia (Spain) between 2004 and 2010. Some of the most deprived neighborhoods in the region received large investments in their public spaces and facilities with the aim of attracting natives and high income individuals and of reducing the concentration of poverty and immigration. The

We investigate the difference in homeownership rates between natives and first-generation immigrants in France, and how this difference evolves over the 1975-1999 period, by using a large longitudinal dataset. We find that the homeownership gap is large and has increased. Entries into the territory have a large negative effect on the evolution of homeownership rates for immigrants. Although entrants

We use a spatial hierarchical regression model to isolate the effects of spatial contagion and urban hierarchy on population levels and apply this model to a unique dataset of American urban areas from 1990 to 2010 that includes all but the smallest rural communities. By disentangling the effects of urban hierarchy and spatial contagion on population levels, we find that large cities are characterized

The configurations of global value chains and production networks are constantly changing, leading to new trajectories and geographical distributions of value creation and capture. In this article, we offer a 40-year evolutionary perspective on power and governance in the global coffee value chain and production network. We identify three distinct phases that are characterised by different power dynamics

This article aims to unpack and analyse the institutional and political dynamics of strategic coupling from a host region perspective, adopting an actor-centred approach that focuses on regional institutions’ efforts to attract and embed lead firm investments within global production networks. We are particularly concerned with understanding the strategic agency and shifting coalitions of actors that

We study the role of land development restrictions for the effects of highway expansion on the spatial distribution of population. We demonstrate that these restrictions strongly interfered with the effects of highways in the Netherlands. Introducing an IV approach to address endogenous interaction variables, our findings show that new highways accelerated population growth in peripheral areas, but

This article draws on Harvey’s theory of uneven development and spatio-temporal fix to conceptualize the changing geography of the European automotive industry based on the spatial profit-seeking strategies of automotive firms. It employs the spatial concept of integrated peripheries, in order to explain the growth of the automotive industry in peripheral regions and its contemporaneous restructuring

Financial and business services (FABS) as intermediaries play a significant role in global production networks (GPNs). Yet the mechanisms through which they influence the activities of lead and supplier firms in GPNs have received little in-depth attention. The paper addresses this shortcoming and examines how global legal business services configure the financial discipline of transnational corporations

Recent advances in global production network theory, known as GPN 2.0, provide a theoretically sophisticated framework for understanding the articulation of global production systems with regional development trajectories. However, this framework was largely derived from lessons out of empirical analyses of the strategic coupling and value capture trajectories of firms in certain manufacturing and

Productivity across European regions is related to three types of networks that mediate R&D-related knowledge spillovers: trade, co-patenting and geographical proximity. Both our panel and instrumental variable estimations for European regions suggest that network relations are crucial sources of R&D spillovers, but with potentially different features. Both import and co-patenting relations affect

Despite the recognition that trade policy—in particular, tariff regimes and rules of origin—can affect the geography of production, much GPN analyses pay scant attention to the tariff context of the sector studied. This paper proposes an analytical framework to more effectively integrate these regimes into applied GPN research. We test the framework, drawing on analysis of exports to the EU market

The Global Production Network (GPN) approach has not yet considered the importance of territorial intermediaries for strategic coupling. This article demonstrates how the prospects of strategic coupling for the case of Vietnam and Indonesia with the oil and gas GPN are affected by the gateway role of Singapore. Based on interviews, the analysis reveals how Singapore influences regional economic development

Statistical studies evidence that openness values matter for regional innovation but not how they matter. A qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) study of 108 North–West European regions identifies four cross-case mechanisms that explain regional innovation: the diversity, cosmopolitan environment, technology transfer and creativity mechanisms. Only in technology transfer do openness values not play

We explore the role of intraand extra-regional product-specific capabilities in the introduction of local discoveries—products new to the firm and to its local market—by Turkish manufacturing firms. We find that product discoveries in a NUTS3 region are favoured by their technological proximity to the product mix of co-located foreign firms. Proximity to co-located domestic firms and local imports

Production processes are fragmenting across borders with countries trading tasks rather than products. Export statistics based on value added reveal a process of vertical specialisation. Yet, what do countries do when exporting? In this article, we provide novel evidence on functional specialisation (FS) in trade. We find surprisingly large and pervasive heterogeneity in specialisation across countries

This paper explores the impact of new universities established in the USA between 1931 and 1980 on population density, GDP and market size measured from 1930 to 2010. The analysis is based on differences in differences on counties selected through propensity score matching, as well as an instrumental variable approach. The evidence suggests that counties hosting a university for the first time grew