This article advances a new approach using hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) for identifying and delineating spatial agglomerations and applies it to venture-backed startups. HCA identifies nested clusters at varying aggregation levels. We describe two methods for selecting a particular aggregation level and the associated agglomerations. The ‘elbow method’ relies entirely on geographic information

We examine the fertility impact of a family-based regularization policy granting temporary legal status to unauthorized immigrants based on their offspring’s citizenship. The policy, enacted through a 2011 Royal Decree in Spain, allows for unauthorized parents of eligible nationalities to become temporary legal residents if they have a Spanish minor. Using data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey (2007–2016)

This article investigates the effects of female immigration to the Dominican Republic (DR)—most of which is from Haiti and of low-education levels—on the labor supply of native women. Using individual-level data for 2003–2016 and exploiting geographic variation in early immigrant settlements together with time variation in female immigration inflows, we find that female immigration has led to disparate

This article critically assesses state–market relations through a comparative firm-level study of state-led development in the China–Myanmar border region. It develops a framework that foregrounds how market building is a contingent and multi-scalar process that underpins the reproduction of stable state rule. The framework is utilized to examine state-led attempts in Ruili, a border city in Yunnan

For academics and policymakers invested in regional economic development, two pertinent questions are how innovative city-regions rise and whether it is inevitable that innovative city-regions will fall. Using data from 8 million patents granted to U.S.-based inventors between 1850 and 1999, this study describes a general process that city-regions undergo as innovation begins, expands, declines and

We identify and quantify the impact of subways on equalising academic achievement in an urban school choice setting. Specifically, we study the short- and medium-term effects of a massive subway network expansion in Chile on the academic achievement gap between low- and high-performing students. Estimates are derived using fixed-effects models. Closer proximity to the subway network is associated with

The aim of this article is to analyze the contribution of social ties to moving to high-opportunity locations and assess whether their effect is more pronounced for low-income individuals as a compensation for economic resources. This is done by utilizing Swedish administrative data and by focusing on a wide range of relationships (observed directly or inferred from the data): close and distant family

We estimate the causal impact of wage variations on commuting distance of workers. We test whether higher wages across years lead workers to live further away from their working place. We use employer–employee data for the French Ile-de-France region (surrounding Paris), from 2003 to 2008, and we deal with the endogenous relation between income and commuting using an instrumental variable strategy

There is increasing interest among policymakers in small open economies in the use of star-scientist recruitment policies to catalyse the development of local clusters in targeted research areas. We use Scopus to assemble a dataset on over 1.4 million publications and subsequent citations for Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand from 1990 to 2017. An event-study model is used to estimate the dynamic effects

Abstract Using detailed housing transactions data from the Netherlands covering more than two decades, we examine the disamenity effect associated with the opening of refugee centers (RCs). We show that the opening of an RC decreases local house prices by 5.8%. The effect has become stronger in the past decade, in line with an increasing share of nationalist votes. Using micro-data on home buyers’

Abstract Differences in access to high-speed broadband between urban and rural locations are known as the ‘digital divide’. Governments around the world have committed to spending considerable amounts of money to alleviate disparities in broadband infrastructure. However, to date, there is limited causal evidence for broadband and firm performance with even less of an understanding on whether the effects

Abstract We investigate the link between the spatial concentration of firms in large, central metropolitans (i.e. urban agglomeration) and the cost of public corporate debt. Looking at bond issues over the period 1985–2014, we find that bonds issued by companies headquartered in urban agglomerates have lower at-issue yield spreads than bonds issued by firms based in remote, sparsely populated areas

Journal of Economic Geography, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbab029

This article relies on a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate the impact of an unconditional cash transfer from Minimum Income Living Allowance (MLSA)—one of the largest basic income guarantee programs in the world—on the household decision to participate in rural–urban migration. The study is informed by novel survey data that provide the first and only representative information on China’s

The paper delivers a framework for the analysis of creative cities based on a topology of cultural places and artists’ perceptions of these places in the Paris Region. We apply this framework to a survey of 267 artists by using mental maps to capture their perceptions of the places they regard as having contributed the most to their creativity. A quantitative treatment of these representations was

We analyze couples’ joint decisions about emigration and labor force participation using survey data on Danish emigrants, combined with full population administrative data. Couples are most likely to emigrate if the male partner or both partners hold a college degree and least likely to emigrate if neither of the partners is college educated. Probability that a dual-earner couple emigrates increases

How has the rise of the automobile influenced urban areas over the past century? In this paper, we investigate the long-run impact of car ownership on urban population density, based on a sample of 232 city observations in 57 countries. Using the presence of a domestic car manufacturer in 1920 as a source of exogenous variation, our IV estimates indicate that car ownership substantially reduces density

What is the impact on intra-national trade and regional economic outcomes when the quality and lane-capacity of an existing paved road network is expanded significantly? We investigate this question for the case of Turkey, which undertook a large-scale public investment in roads during the 2000s. Using spatially disaggregated data on road upgrades and domestic transactions, we estimate a large positive

This study investigates whether high-skilled migration in a sample of OECD countries fosters technological diversification in the migrants’ countries of origin. We focus on migrant inventors and study their role as vectors of knowledge remittances. Further, we particularly analyze whether migrants spark related or unrelated diversification back home. To account for the uneven distribution of knowledge

We use a multilevel approach to investigate whether a general and robust relationship between weather shocks and (internal and international) migration intentions can be uncovered in Western African countries. We combine individual survey data with measures of localized weather shocks for 13 countries over the 2008–2016 period. A meta-analysis on results from about 51,000 regressions is conducted to

We investigate whether localities gain or lose employment when there are connected to a transportation network, such as a high-speed railway line. We argue that long-haul economies—implying that the marginal transportation cost decreases with network distance—play a pivotal role in understanding the location choices of firms. We develop a new spatial model to show that improvements in transportation

Journal of Economic Geography 2021, https://doi:10.1093/jeg/lbab028

Journal of Economic Geography, 2021, lbab025, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbab025

How important is foreign knowledge for domestic innovation outcomes? How is this relation shaped by globalization and the attendant intensification of international competition? Our empirical approach extends the previous literature by analyzing a large panel comprising industries in both advanced and emerging economies over the past two decades. We find that barriers to the domestic diffusion of foreign

Journal of Economic Geography 2020, 21, 287–315; doi: 10.1093/jeg/lbaa035

This article questions retailers’ role as buyers driving production. Exploring a network involving Indian suppliers of UK retailers’ cotton garments, limitations preventing coercive buyer power from controlling production practices are identified. Overall, the dominant system of large-scale fragmented supplier networks connecting raw materials to final products accommodates commercially viable practices

This article analyzes the entry of corn-ethanol plants in the Midwestern USA, where the majority of corn in the USA is grown, during the second US ethanol boom. In particular, we examine whether the presence of existing ethanol plants affects ethanol plant entry decisions at the county level using discrete response panel models. There are two main channels through which existing ethanol plants may

This paper studies the impact of granting a community the authority to tax development when growth imposes negative externalities on existing residents. Taxes are chosen in each period by the residents who are fully forward-looking. Residents’ policy choices reflect not only the desire to counter negative externalities but also their wish to raise tax revenues and the value of their homes. There exists

There is a growing debate about whether new housing units increase rents for immediately surrounding apartments. Some argue new market-rate development produces a supply effect, which should alleviate the demand pressure on existing housing units and decrease their rents. Others contend that new development will attract high-income households and new amenities, generating an amenity effect and driving

I analyze how high-skilled immigration affects native, immigrant and collaborative innovation, using an IV approach that exploits exogenous variation in push factors of migration across origin regions and over time. The overall impact of high-skilled immigration on innovation is positive and substantial. High-skilled immigrants from developed regions of the world and with a PhD contribute by innovating

More than 30 million people migrated to the USA between late-ninetieth and early-twentieth century, and thousands became inventors. Drawing on a novel dataset of immigrant inventors in the USA, we assess the city-level impact of immigrants’ patenting and their contribution to the technological specialization of the receiving US regions between 1870 and 1940. Our results show that native inventors benefited

Using a novel database on multinational production (MP), this article investigates the impact of preferential trade agreements on foreign affiliates’ production activities. We find that trade agreements with investment provisions have a positive effect on MP. On average, signing an agreement including investment provisions is associated with increased MP up to 26% in the manufacturing sector and 34%

In this article, we make use of large-scale municipal border changes in Germany to provide the first evidence on the effect of local border changes on the distribution of activity in space. To allow for a comparison of economic activity within unique geographical units over time, we use geo-coded light data as well as local land-use data. Applying a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence

We study the impact of local immigration inflows on natives’ wages using a large French administrative panel from 1976 to 2007. We show that local immigration inflows are followed by reallocations of blue-collar natives across commuting zones. Because these reallocations vary with the initial occupation, and blue-collar location movers have wages below the blue-collar average, controlling for changes

Post crisis, local governments’ (LGs) budgets have been drastically cut in Britain. Similar budgetary strains had serious consequences in the past, leading to major restructuring in LGs’ functions. This paper interrogates the spatial dynamics of short-term municipal finances by putting into dialogue the political economy perspectives on financialisation with the economic geography literature on urban

Journal of Economic Geography 2021, 00, 1–34; doi:10.1093/jeg/lbaa033

Climate change is a defining challenge of our times. The five papers collected in this special issue provide foundations to well-informed policymaking by addressing two main themes of the economic geography of climate change. First, it brings effects that are heterogeneous across space. Some regions of the globe will lose more than others and some may even be better off as a result. Second, humans

We take an institutional perspective to examine how innovation thrives under conditions of resistance. Specifically, we conceive illicit innovation as a process of successive institutionalization of a new practice in the face of contrary law. In the German federal state of Bavaria, the global movement of craft-beer brewing collides with a regional jurisdiction that prohibits precisely these brewing

We study the effects of Jamuna Bridge in Bangladesh that reduced the average trade costs by 50% and connected 26 million people by road to the capital city. We use a difference-in-difference design where the isolated Padma hinterland constitutes the comparison. Balance tests for an array of economic characteristics support the parallel trends assumption. The bridge led to economic revival in the Jamuna

Using data from the 545 largest European cities, we study whether the expansion of their highway capacity provides a solution to the problem of traffic congestion. Our results confirm that in the long run, and in line with the ‘fundamental law of highway congestion’, the expansion in cities of lane kilometres causes an increase in vehicle traffic that does not solve urban congestion. We disentangle

AbstractThis article exploits the quasi-natural experiment provided by the extensive road network that was built across the Horn of Africa during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936–1941), to examine how a first-mover advantage in transportation can affect the spatial distribution of economic activity in developing countries over the long run. The results show that Italian paved roads rendered

Increasing returns to scale is the basis for many powerful results in economics and economic geography. But the limitations of assumptions about returns to scale in economic growth theories are often ignored when applied to geography. This leads to an unintentional bias favoring scale and mistaken conclusions about geography, scale and growth. Alternatively, this bias is used as a convenient modeling

We investigate the impact of an increase in immigrant inflows on natives’ residential choices in a large metropolitan city. We utilize an administrative dataset containing information about residential address changes and self-reported reasons for relocation. Exploiting the expansion of a special visa program as an exogenous shock, we find that immigration inflows are both a push and a pull factor

This paper explores regional firm entry connecting insights on the role of localised path dependency with the analysis of variety in regional sectoral structures. Using data on 700 SIC5 industries across 174 NUTS3 regions in the UK between 2000 and 2014, we provide evidence of positive complementarities between industrial path dependence and regional-related variety for firm entry in rooted pre-existing

We analyse how spatial disparities in innovation activities, coupled with migration costs, affect economic geography, market structure, growth and regional inequality. We provide conditions for existence and uniqueness of a spatial equilibrium, and for the endogenous emergence of industry clusters. Spatial variations in knowledge spillovers lead to spatial concentration of more innovative firms. Migration

This article analyses how the private governance of global value chains (GVCs) varies across multiple end-markets. This is explored through a two-stage mixed-methods analysis of Kenya’s participation in leather value chains serving Europe, China, India and the COMESA region. We first draw on transaction-level customs data to analyse private governance in terms of the stability of buyer–supplier interactions

Abstract This article studies the relationship between past immigration experiences of the host country and the way new immigrants enter the labor market. We focus on two countries—Finland and Sweden—that have similar formal institutions but starkly different immigration histories. In both countries, immigrants tend to find their first jobs in low-paying establishments, where the manager and colleagues

We study the impact of immigration on the product mix of the receiving economy by combining information on the local presence of immigrants with a highly detailed definition of the set of goods produced by Italian provinces. For the period 2002–2011, we find that an increase in the share of migrants shifts the manufacturing output composition of host provinces in favour of less capital intensive products

Rising political skepticism on the benefits of global economic integration has increased public scrutiny of the foreign activities of domestic firms in virtually all advanced economies. Decisions to invest in new activities abroad are seen by some commentators as potentially detrimental to domestic employment. We contribute to this debate by scrutinizing the relationship between outward ‘greenfield’

This article investigates the local economic cost of hosting refugees. Using administrative data in France, we show that the opening of small housing centers for refugees decreases the economic activity in hosting municipalities. We demonstrate that this downturn is related to a decline in the population by around 2% due to fewer people moving to hosting municipalities. We show that this avoidance

Abstract We exploit locally exogenous variation from the Blitz bombings to quantify the effect of redevelopment frictions and identify agglomeration economies at a micro-geographic scale. Employing rich location and office rental transaction data, we estimate reduced-form analyses and a spatial general equilibrium model. Our analyses demonstrate that more heavily bombed areas exhibit taller buildings

2021 sees the Journal of Economic Geography (JEG) enter its third decade of publication, offering an apposite moment to briefly reflect upon its evolution and trajectory. Since the first issue appeared in January 2001, JEG has been on a journey encompassing 92 regular issues, 20 special issues, 731 papers, 13 debates and commentaries pieces, 153 book reviews, 7 editorials and 6 agenda-setting IMPULSES

AbstractOver 6 million households experienced foreclosure during the financial crisis. Where did they move, how did they fare and why? First, we create a new longitudinal dataset between 2006 and 2011 from households’ date of foreclosure to their relocation. Despite significant heterogeneity in mobility outcomes, we find that individuals move to, on average, higher quality locations. However, these

Trade costs contribute to price differentials across geographically separated regions. However, when using price differential data, the identification of distance-elastic trade costs depends on how producers set prices in remote markets. To address this problem, we first empirically demonstrate that a variable markup model is more relevant than a constant markup model to describe the data variation

This paper estimates the marginal accident externality of driving in Central London by exploiting variation in traffic flow induced by the London Congestion Charge Zone using an instrumental variable approach. The charge attributed to a 9.4% reduction in traffic flow, which resulted in a less than proportional 6.0% and 7.6% decrease in accidents and slight injuries, and a 6.5% increase in serious injuries/fatalities

We study the labour market performance of refugees vis-à-vis comparable migrants across 20 European countries and over time. In the first part of our analysis, we document that labour market outcomes for refugees are consistently worse than those for other migrants. Refugees are 11.6% less likely to have a job and 22% more likely to be unemployed than other migrants with similar characteristics. Their

Culture matters for regional economic development and is one source of cognitive lock-in that influences path creation and dependency. However, little is known about the sources of regional variation in culture. This study explores the long-term imprinting effect of the Industrial Revolution on cultural practices across local communities in Great Britain. Historical data from 1891 on the employment

AbstractOver the past decade or so, concern has grown in economic geography over whether the discipline has become too pluralised, characterised by the proliferation of conceptual schemas, theoretical approaches and local narratives, between which there is often little communication or coherence, thereby militating against the identification of a clear and generally agreed disciplinary identity and