This article studies how airports affect regional growth in population and employment, considering heterogeneity in the circumstances of an airport’s opening. We use synthetic controls with staggered adoption and data on the whole airport system in Norway for 1950–2019. We find positive overall effects of airports on population and employment growth. Addressing heterogeneity, we find relatively strong

During the last few decades, the gap between the most prosperous metropolitan areas and the rural areas has widened, especially since the 2008 crisis. This gap has been particularly relevant in relation to population and employment. However, the bi-directional links in terms of population and employment between rural places and the most urbanized areas have been partly overlooked by the literature

Declining fertility and the persistent underrepresentation of women in the labour market are key concerns of our time. The fact that they overlap is not fortuitous. Traditionally, women everywhere have faced a conflict in balancing their career ambitions with family responsibilities. Yet, the pressures arising from this conflict vary enormously from one place to another. Existing research has tended

This article explores the role of evolutionary economic geography in enhancing understanding and implementation of the circular economy (CE). By incorporating spatial and territorial dimensions into CE research, this study emphasizes the significant influence of geographical factors on achieving economic and environmental objectives. The research highlights the importance of localizing CE practices

Digital business-to-business (B2B) platforms have become essential components of today's economy. However, the impact of digital B2B platforms on global production networks has not yet been sufficiently conceptualized and empirically examined. This article proposes an analytical framework to theorize platform-based reconfigurations of global production networks. By using the case of digital logistics

Economic geography data are typically reported using political units, such as counties, which often do not match economic units. Commuting zones (CZs) group counties into labor markets. However, CZs are not the most appropriate grouping for other economic activities. We introduce consumption zones (ConZs), groupings of counties appropriate for the analysis of consumption. We apply CZ methodology to

On 5 June 2017, an airspace blockade was imposed on the State of Qatar by Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (neighboring countries), and Egypt. We exploit this exogenous increase in air transportation costs toward non-blockading countries to examine the effect of increased travel distance, due to re-routing, on bilateral trade. Based on a gravity model estimated using a Poisson pseudo-maximum

We revisit the natural experiments of division and unification of Germany. The negative shock to local market access following the division of Germany led to a fast and strong downward adjustment of the size of West German cities near the new border. In contrast, the positive shock of reunification did not lead to any change in their relative size. Even three decades after reunification, no convergence

In recent decades, renewable energy cooperatives have substantially increased their share of renewable energy production. The operation of these cooperatives requires collective action, potentially supported by local social capital. We investigate whether municipal-level bonding and bridging social capital explain the differences in the prevalence of renewable energy cooperatives across Dutch municipalities

In urban economics, transportation costs are a key determinant of land value. However, in virtual worlds, these costs are generally limited by the users’ ability to teleport. Drawing from urban and attention economic literature, we propose a theoretical model microfounded on user behavior. The model suggests that the relative value of land parcels hinges on their potential to attract visitors. Our

This article studies the effect of return initiatives in rural regions of Germany on interregional return migration. The initiatives aim to increase return migration by, amongst other things, providing information on local employment opportunities and personal support to workers interested in returning to find a job in the former rural region of residence. Analysing administrative data on individual

We study whether highway and railroad improvements cause population suburbanization in Europe’s cities. We construct a unique population and transportation dataset covering 579 cities from 29 European countries for the period 1961–2011. In order to make a causal inference, we rely on historical instruments. Our average results indicate that highways, but not railroads, were responsible for the suburbanization

We develop monthly asylum seeker flow forecasting models for 157 origin countries to the EU27, using machine learning and high-dimensional data, including digital trace data from Google Trends. Comparing different models and forecasting horizons and validating out-of-sample, we find that an ensemble forecast combining Random Forest and Extreme Gradient Boosting algorithms outperforms the random walk

This article offers new evidence on agglomeration economies by examining the link between total factor productivity (TFP) and employment density in Italy. We investigate whether and how the TFP–density nexus contributes to explaining a relevant share of the marked productivity gap between the northern and the southern Italian regions. We estimate TFP for a large sample of manufacturing firms and then

This article analyzes the role of production factor land in the production process. Using a novel dataset of 20,205 newly established firms in the Chinese manufacturing sector from 2007 to 2014, our production function estimates suggest the existence of a sizable gap (averaging 50 USD/m2) between the marginal productivity of land and its user cost. Basic economic theory suggests a possible relationship

Between 2010 and 2019, the global number of forcibly displaced individuals doubled, prompting countries to sign migration deals. Under these agreements, transit or origin countries halt migrants in exchange for support. The 2017 Italy–Libya deal outsourced search and rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean to the Libyan Coast Guard (LCG), aiming to stop migrants from reaching Italy. Using a

This article investigates the interplay between scientific and technological capabilities in regional technological diversification dynamics by looking at the contributions of academic inventors. Combining the evolutionary economic approach and the theories on regional innovation capabilities on the one hand, and the distinctive features of academic inventors and university–industry patenting on the

Agglomeration externalities are the key factor explaining the existence of cities and their size. However, while the various micro foundations of agglomeration externalities stress the importance of total factor productivity (TFP), the empirical evidence on agglomeration externalities rests on measures obtained using firm revenue or value-added as a measure of firm output: revenue-based TFP (TFP-R)

An increasing number of regional trade agreements contains provisions that ease access to visas among member countries, which reduces the administrative cost of crossing the border. Combining United Nations data on bilateral stocks of immigrants in the period 1990–2020 with World Bank data on the content of 279 regional trade agreements, this article presents robust evidence of a positive effect of

We analyze the externalities arising from a bilateral asylum policy—the list of safe origin countries—relying on a tractable model. Using self-collected monthly data, we estimate that including one origin country on the safe list of a given destination decreases asylum applications from that origin to that destination by 29 per cent. We use a counterfactual policy simulation to quantify the spillover

We argue that trans-local knowledge connections positively impact local epistemic inventor communities in global cities, using patent citations as an indicator of global knowledge connectivity. Patented inventions have become more concentrated in the most internationally connected global cities, increasing inter-regional inequality. We identify two dimensions of knowledge connectivity: the compatibility

Drawing on financial geography literature and the concept of state rescaling, this article investigates the state–finance nexus with an emphasis on state spatial reconfiguration. Through a historically and geographically informed political economic analysis, it argues that China’s state-led, market-oriented rural banking reforms are not merely the outcome of a deepening market logic within the financial

This article combines unconditional quantile regressions with difference-in-differences to study the distributive effects of a foreign buyer tax (FBT) on home prices in New South Wales (NSW). The main results reveal that the FBT reduces house prices in NSW but only among the more expensive houses located in desirable neighborhoods of Sydney and with a relatively high share of foreign-born population

Social scientists and policymakers alike have become increasingly concerned with understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of inter-regional inequality in economic living conditions. Contemporary spatial inequality is multi-faceted—it varies depending on how we define inequality, the scale at which it is measured, and which groups in the labor force are considered. Increasing economic inequality

This article examines the effect of formal and informal institutional settings and of the governance of inter-organizational relationships on innovation at the cluster level. The research primarily relies on quantitative methods, utilizing data obtained from a survey involving 115 firms and 12 in-depth interviews. Supplementary qualitative information from the interviews has also been incorporated

Persistent racial inequality in socioeconomic status within urban areas has been a significant concern in both the US and European countries. Differences across racial groups in intergenerational mobility (IM) have been identified as a key source of this persistence. However, efforts to understand racial inequality in IM have rarely considered the role of urban sprawl. This article argues that urban

Firms may seek non-redundant information through inter-firm relations beyond their geographic and cognitive boundaries (i.e., relations with firms in other regions and active in different fields). Little is known about the conditions under which firms benefit from this high-risk/high-gain strategy. We created a digital layer of 600,000 German firms by using their websites’ textual and relational content

This article estimates commuters’ scheduling utility function, which comprises the disutility of arriving at work earlier or later than desired (namely, the schedule-delay cost) and the disutility of travel time. The marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between the schedule delay and the travel time is about 0.85, meaning that commuters are willing to accept an extra schedule delay of about 1.2 time

We estimate the causal impact of communication infrastructure quality on growth and structural transformation. We use variation across US counties’ Internet speeds in 2018 and build an instrument using ARPANET, a military network that preceded the modern Internet, with its location documented in historical government reports. We find that doubling Internet speeds increases the 4-year employment growth

This article explores how the gold mining sector has adapted and evolved in developing countries since the onset of the global pandemic. A major criticism of capital-intensive gold mines has been that they occur as enclaves which fail to catalyze local economic development. Pre-pandemic, the pressure applied by NGOs and donors on gold mining companies to ‘de-enclave’ was steadily building. It has since

Conditions of local governance in the aftermath of the global financial crisis are often discussed as reflections of ‘austerity urbanism’. What forms of mutations have taken place in austerity urbanism after the initial years of spending cuts at the local level? This article investigates this question by focusing on the uneven geographies of post-austerity debt-drive in Britain. It is shown that austerity

Affordable housing projects may affect neighboring property values. Negative spillovers are more likely in developing countries because governments may fail to provide complementary infrastructures such as schools. We study one of the world’s largest affordable housing projects, the Mehr housing project in Iran, which facilitated the construction of 2 million affordable apartments. Using the universe

We study firms’ optimal R&D location strategies in a dynamic industry model with competition in product quality. In light of potential future inwards and outwards spillovers firms make their location choices relying on heuristic strategies that are based on the expected present values associated with alternative location patterns. Using a simulation analysis, we show how the strategies of innovators

This article investigates the impact of working from home (WFH) on the emergence and structure of monocentric cities. In the long run, WFH raises urban productivity only in sufficiently large cities. Business land rents fall while residential land rents decrease near the business district. Workers have incentives to adopt inefficiently high WFH schemes. In the short run, WFH yields mixed benefits for

We examine how the decentralization of public employment services (PES) affects the behavior and service provision of PES offices and the labor market outcomes of job seekers. We use difference-in-differences, utilizing a Finnish temporary reform during which PES were decentralized for specific groups of job seekers in treated municipalities and remained centralized for others. The reform presented

Interest in regional convergence in mean incomes has been rekindled by findings that suggest a shift from convergence to divergence. While the majority of existing research has explored convergence in mean incomes, this research focuses specifically on the convergence/divergence of interpersonal income distributions across regions, referred to throughout the study as comparative inter-regional inter-personal

This study investigates the decoupling of Ukrainian aerospace, defense and electro-engineering industries resulting from the Russian Crimean annexation in 2014. Conceptually, we contribute to global value chain/global production network research by developing the notion of geopolitical decoupling, thus augmenting the existing 2-fold typology. Moreover, the article elaborates a typology of recoupling

This article examines economic resilience by combining high-frequency truck flows and the lockdown policy shock during COVID-19 in China. We discover that the truck flows in regions with higher levels of diversification and vertical integration see a smaller decrease in response to the COVID-19 shock. Dynamically, such moderating effects of diversification and vertical integration get smaller with

This article exploits signals of capital pricing and availability in US cities which are obtained from uniquely detailed data on real estate investments. We identify how places were differently affected by the global financial crisis and provide insights which offer an alternative explanation of why US economic growth continues to experience spatial divergence after many decades of convergence. Investment

This article examines the role of work at the cutting of technological change—frontier work—as a driver of prosperity and spatial income inequality. Using new methods and data, we analyze the geography and incomes of frontier workers from 1880 to 2019. Initially, frontier work is concentrated in a set of ‘seedbed’ locations, contributing to rising spatial inequality through powerful localized wage

Right-wing populism and related geographies of discontent have become central subjects in the recent debate on regional inequalities. The present contribution seeks to complement existing, predominantly synoptic approaches by looking at specific economic practices of local actors. We argue that exclusionary regional political identities are transferred to firms and shape corporate practices. Using

Why did rural areas recover from the great recession much more slowly than metropolitan areas? Due to declining tax revenues and intergovernmental aid, employment in the American local government sector fell substantially after the great recession. Cuts to local public employment were especially large, long-lasting and consequential in rural areas, which have become relatively dependent on public-sector

In China, state-led financialisation through local government financing platforms resulted in a surge in local government debt. To manage financial risk, the central state introduced local government bonds (LGBs) to replace the platforms as the main financing source for infrastructure investment. The issuance of LGBs is subject to a budgetary process. We argue that LGBs mark a turn to state de-financialisation

When people migrate internally, do they tend to move to locations that reflect their political preferences? To address this question, we combine evidence from a unique panel dataset on population movements across local authority districts in England and Wales (2002–2015) with evidence stemming from individual survey-based data. Our results suggest that political similarity between two districts exerts

In this article, we adopt a task approach to measure the local pool of capabilities which can more effectively spur innovation. By focusing on the core activities that workers undertake in their jobs, we build an abstract task intensity measure of occupations to proxy the ability in analysing and solving complex problems, as well as in coordinating and integrating people with different knowledge endowments

We analyze land-use regulation and the determinants thereof across Swiss municipalities. We construct several residential development stringency indices based on a comprehensive survey. These indices capture various aspects of local regulation and land-use coordination across jurisdictions. Combining these indices, we construct an index that provides harmonized information about what local regulation

In this article, I use the emerging concept of geographies of dissociation to examine fragmented labour regimes in global production networks (GPNs). The article takes informality in the Sri Lankan apparel industry and the application of ethical codes as a case example. Using qualitative research methods, I provide a critical analytical lens through which the concept of dissociation makes visible what

This article uses a purpose-designed land parcels database covering all rural land transactions over 16 years (2004–2019 inclusive) to document the ways in which financialised agri-corporate investors acquired farmland in a major Australian cropping and grazing region, New England North West (NENW). Framing these investments through the lens of strategic coupling reveals a mix of land acquisition strategies

Using the 2017 Pohang earthquake in South Korea as a natural experiment, we examined the responses of the population. By constructing a counterfactual of Pohang using synthetic controls, we found that the earthquake significantly decreased the local population. To investigate the mechanisms of population decrease, we gathered administrative data on the universe of address changes and self-reported

It is widely understood that innovations tend to be concentrated in cities, which is evidenced by innovative output increasing disproportionately with city size. Yet, given the heterogeneity of countries and technologies, few studies explore the relationship between population and innovation numbers. For instance, in the USA, innovative output scaling is substantial and is particularly pronounced for

Economic change over the past 20 years has rendered many individuals and territories vulnerable, leading to greater interpersonal and interterritorial inequality. This rising inequality is seen as a root cause of populism. Yet, there is no comparative evidence as to whether this discontent is the consequence of localised interpersonal inequality or stagnant growth in ‘left-behind’ places. This article

We analyse whether and to what extent the quality of regional institutions has a differential effect on firms’ growth driven by heterogeneity in firm value chain positioning. We analyse turnover growth during the period 2010–2013 for a sample of manufacturing firms located in four European countries—France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We distinguish final firms serving end markets from suppliers serving

Do electoral incentives affect immigration policies? Exploiting the Italian system for refugees’ reception and data from Italian municipalities, we show that proximity to elections reduces the probability that a municipality applies to host a refugee center by 26%, despite the economic benefits arising from these centers. Low electoral competition and high shares of extreme-right voters drive the effect

Patent data provides rich information about technical inventions, but does not disclose the ethnic origin of inventors. In this article, I use supervised learning techniques to infer this information. To do so, I construct a dataset of 96′777 labeled names and train an artificial recurrent neural network with long short-term memory (LSTM) to predict ethnic origins based on names. The trained network

We analyse mergers and acquisitions in the financial sector between 2000 and 2017 to explore the domestic hierarchies of financial centres. Across a sample of 16 countries, we reveal different levels of financial centre primacy and explain how these levels change over time. These findings are analysed through a theoretical framework which integrates the literatures on urban primacy, global and world

This article measures the effects of workers’ mobility across regions characterised by different productivity levels through the lens of a search and matching model with heterogeneous workers and firms estimated using administrative data. In an application to Italy, the model estimates imply that the relocation of workers to the most productive region boosts employment and output at the country level

In this article, we investigate the contribution of increasing travel times to the persistent gender gap in labor market participation. In doing so, we estimate the effect of commuting times on the labor supply of men and women in the USA using microdata from the censuses of the last two decades. To address endogeneity concerns, we adopt an instrumental variables approach that exploits the shape of

Highway construction occurs nowadays mainly through widening of existing roads rather than building new roads. This article documents that highway widenings considerably reduce congestion in the short run, defined here as 6 years. Using longitudinal microdata from highway detector loops in the Netherlands, we find substantial travel time savings. These savings occur despite strong increases in traffic

Local communities have been identified as crucial actors in the diffusion of renewable energy, considered one of the most important eco-innovations of our time. Anecdotal evidence has indicated that local communities tend to play different roles in promoting eco-innovation, particularly renewable energy. However, what this heterogeneity looks like has not yet been quantitatively examined. Our study

Using the 2016 merger of French regions as a natural experiment, this paper adopts a difference-in-differences identification strategy to recover its causal impact on individual subjective well-being. No depressing effect is found in the short term; life satisfaction has even increased in regions that were absorbed from both economic and political viewpoints. The empirical evidence at stake suggests