Stimulating or frustrating research ? Transport geography and (un)available data

Transport Investment, Geography, and Growth

A substantial part of the economic growth literature suggests that historically, geographic features such as decreasing trade costs have improved not only output but also growth. However, this literature lacks an analytical motivation for lower trade barriers, and assumes their decrease to obtain exogenously and at no cost. This paper attempts to address the issue by investigating how endogenou...

Approximate models for aggregate data when individual-level data sets are very large or unavailable.

In this article, we study a Bayesian hierarchical model for profiling health-care facilities using approximately sufficient statistics for aggregate facility-level data when the patient-level data sets are very large or unavailable. Starting with a desired patient-level model, we give several approximate models and the corresponding summary statistics necessary to implement the approximations. ...

Geography of Industry and Transport

Partial Answers for Unavailable Data Sources

Many heterogeneous database system products and prototypes exist today; they will soon be deployed in a wide variety of environments. Most existing systems suffer from an Achilles’ heel: they ungracefully fail in presence of unavailable data sources. If some data sources are unavailable when accessed, these systems either silently ignore them or generate an error. This behavior is improper in e...

Geography of Innovations and Geography of Research: the French Experience

In the literature, innovation is the outcome of spatial interactions between the innovative structure of a district and its knowledge structure: innovations tend to concentrate in the locations where they find knowledge that is necessary for the development of innovating activities. Thus, proximity increases the chance of developing new ideas (Feldman, 1999). Starting from this theoretical hypo...