This study investigates spatial dependence and mechanisms of regional development in Greater Beijing, China by employing spatial statistical techniques. We have detected positive, strengthening global spatial autocorrelation from 1978 to 2001, and found such strengthening is the result of newly formed/extended clusters in the area. The local analysis recognizes local regimes of two-tier urban-r...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008 and idiosyncratic shocks. Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion of households had to adjust food consumption in response. Regression results indicate that households w...

Technical Change and Total Factor Productivity Growth: The Case of Chinese Provinces In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect technical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely external non-economic) as well as other exogenous (e...

Search, Migration, and Urban Land Use: The Case of Transportation Policies We develop a search-matching model with rural-urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steadystate equilibrium. We then consider three different policies: a transportation policy that improves the public transport system in the city, an ...

Do Family Planning Programmes Help Women’s Employment? The Case of Indian Mothers The paper deals with female employment in developing countries. We set out a model to test our argument that, at the first stage of development, demographic and health programmes have proven to be more effective for women’s position in the society than specific labour and income support policies. Our household mod...

This paper investigates the impact of new firms’ quality on the magnitude of their employment effects. Our results clearly show that the quality of start-ups, measured by their affiliation with sectors and innovative industries, strongly influences the direct and the overall employment contribution of new firms. In particular, start-ups in manufacturing industries generate larger direct and ove...

We examine variation in the concentration of inventive activity across 72 of North America’s most highly innovative locations. In 12 of these areas, innovation is particularly concentrated in a single large firm; we refer to such locations as “company towns.” We find that inventors employed by large firms in these locations tend to draw disproportionately from their firm’s own prior inventions ...

Human Capital, Economic Growth, and Regional Inequality in China We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economicand TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital; the infusion of new technology and its regional spr...