The impact of environmental stringency on capital flows remains a hotly contested issue. Moreover, existing parametric estimates using counts of new foreign-owned manufacturing plant births provide counter-intuitive results: pollution abatement costs are only found to have an impact in non-pollution-intensive sectors. Applying recently developed nonparametric count data methods, we re-visit thi...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortg...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it shows the properties that regional economics is implicitly assuming when “relative” inequality measures, such as the Gini coefficient and the generalized entropy family of indexes, are used to quantify the geographic concentration of economic activity. Second, it proposes a new geographic concentration index that is based on an “absolute” inequality m...

The Patentatlas by Greif and Schmiedl (2002) represents an important source for patent data in Germany. Its use for industry-specific studies is however problematic because the correct assignment of patent data classified by technological fields to commonly used industry classifications is unclear. This paper presents an application-oriented approach to this issue. In using industryspecific R&D...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue. Moreover, technological change has eliminated the importance of fixed infrastructure transport (rail and wat...

This paper provides detailed information about spatial interactions in the job creation process in West German regional labor markets. We investigate spatial (auto-) correlations in the matching process of vacancies and unemployed, examine regional hiring patterns, and identify clusters of regions with intense inter-regional matching. An extensive specification analysis illustrates the extent o...

In many developing countries, agriculture hires at least as many workers as manufacturing industries. We investigate an economic geography model in which agricultural goods are costly to transport and in which manufactures hire labor from the local agricultural sector as unskilled labor. Our conclusions show that the parameters in the agricultural sector are crucial to determine the spatial con...

The paper studies the optimal distribution of business and residential land in a circular city. Once the optimum is characterized, we analyze the effect of changes in commuting costs and externality parameters. We also propose policies like labor subsidies, land taxes and zoning restrictions that can implement the efficient allocation as an equilibrium, or close the gap between the optimal and ...

Regional Dependencies in Job Creation: An Efficiency Analysis for Western Germany This paper investigates the efficiency of the matching process between job seekers and vacancy posting firms in West-Germany, using variation across labor market regions and across time. The results of a stochastic frontier analysis shed new light on extent and regional differences of search frictions, on potentia...

We use new data on the location and background of entrants into the US tyre industry to analyse why the industry became so regionally concentrated around Akron, Ohio, a small city with no compelling advantages for tyre production. We analyse where the Ohio entrants originated and conduct various analyses of how proximity to other tyre firms affected the longevity of tyre producers. We also exam...