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

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

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

AbstractThis 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

AbstractIncreasing 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

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

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%

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

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

This paper quantitatively assesses the world’s changing economic geography and sectoral specialization due to global warming. It proposes a two-sector dynamic spatial growth model that incorporates the relation between economic activity, carbon emissions and temperature. The model is taken to the data at the 1° by 1° resolution for the entire world. Over a 200-year horizon, rising temperatures consistent

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

AbstractWe 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

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

AbstractWe 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

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

AbstractWe 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

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

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

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

AbstractUsing 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

AbstractWe 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

AbstractWe 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

AbstractEurope has witnessed a considerable labour productivity slowdown in recent decades. Many potential explanations have been proposed to address this productivity ‘puzzle’. However, how the quality of local institutions influences labour productivity has been overlooked by the literature. This article addresses this gap by evaluating how institutional quality affects labour productivity growth

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

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

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

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

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

AbstractRegional knowledge spaces are heterogeneous, and the structure of these knowledge spaces can play a significant role in shaping regional economic performances during economic downturns. This article explores the relationship between a region’s technological profile and its resilience to exogenous shocks. To identify the determinants of regional economic resilience, we perform panel analyses

AbstractRising 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’

AbstractTrade 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 article studies the provision of urban green areas in cities where residents have preferences for the size of and access to those areas. At the optimum, the number of urban green spaces is a nonmonotone function of distance to the city center, while the sizes and distances to other urban green areas increase as one moves to the urban fringe. This article empirically investigates those properties

AbstractA growing body of research is demonstrating a robust positive relationship between the diversity of a city’s foreign-born population in the USA and worker productivity. Other research has focused on diversity within firms, similarly finding positive effects in many cases. Although it appears that diverse teams within firms are better at problem-solving and are more creative, the exact mechanism(s)

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 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

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

Over 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 locations

We examine the relationship between immigration and preferences for redistribution in Europe using a newly assembled dataset of immigrant stocks for 140 regions in 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native respondents display lower support for redistribution when the share of immigrants in their residence

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

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

We exploit a decomposition of gross trade flows into their value added components to reassess the relationship between increased imports from China and manufacturing jobs in US local labour markets following the seminal paper of Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013, ADH). Decomposed trade flows enable us to address identification and measurement issues inherent to gross trade data. In particular, it allows

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 percent reduction in public transit supply increases the travel time of motor-vehicles by about 1.6 percent 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

Asylum policies are interdependent across countries: policy choices in one country can affect refugee flows into neighbouring countries and may provoke policy changes there, in an a priori unknown direction. We formulate a dynamic model of refugees’ location choices and of the strategic interaction among destinations that we fit to Syrian refugee migration to Europe. We find that south and southeastern

Differential institutions imposed during colonial rule continue to affect the spatial structure and urban interactions in African cities. Based on a sample of 318 cities across 28 countries using satellite data on built cover over time, Anglophone origin cities sprawl compared to Francophone ones. Anglophone cities have less intense land use and more irregular layout in the older colonial portions

The UK decision to exit the EU in 2016 has led to economic uncertainty. Foreign corporations with UK subsidiaries have sought to mediate these uncertainties while a final agreement is negotiated. Critical to this is the relationship between headquarter-subsidiary relations (HQs) and these subsidiaries. Discourse analysis has increasingly been used to examine corporate relations, with the corporation

AbstractWe study the relationship between changes in weather patterns and the spatial distribution of population and economic activity within countries. Our unique global dataset combines climatic and census data for the period 1950–2015 with satellite data on built-up areas, and light intensity at night for the 1990–2015 periods. We establish a global non-linear effect of climate on urbanisation.

Despite the existence of a large urban-rural education gap in many countries, little attention has been paid whether cities enjoy a comparative advantage in the production of human capital. Using Dutch administrative data, this paper finds that conditional on family characteristics and cognitive ability, children who grow up in urban regions consistently attain higher levels of human capital compared

AbstractWe use administrative data containing all business establishments in New York City to analyze how businesses reacted to flooding in the context of Hurricane Sandy (October 2012). We find that flooding led to reductions in employment (of about 4%) and average wages (of about 2%) among the affected businesses. The effects were substantially larger and more persistent in some parts of the city

We develop a two-sector model of monopolistic competition with a dierentiated intermediate good and variable elasticity of technological substitution. This setting proves to be well-suited to studying the nature and origins of external increasing returns. We disentangle two sources of scale economies: specialization and competition. The former depends only on how TFP varies with input diversity, while

This paper 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 had a persistent effect on the distribution of population within local labor markets, but only a temporary effect on

This paper looks at the link between Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) and employment in local firms in their host regions. The paper cross-fertilizes the literature on MNE spillovers with the emerging body of research on industrial relatedness. This paper empirically tests the link between industrial relatedness and MNE impacts on employment by capturing various types of horizontal and vertical similarities

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 for the years 2003-2015, we build an exogenous and fully data-driven indicator of mortgage supply stances and use it as an 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