Agglomeration economies with consistent productivity estimates

This paper investigates the relative impact of microeconomic agglomeration mechanisms on plant's total factor productivity (TFP) using German establishment and employment-level data. Contrasting different strategies for estimating TFP from plant-level production functions reveals that unobserved output prices bias true productivity and lead to underestimated agglomeration economies. With the corrected TFP measure, the largest impact is found for labor market pooling, which is captured by the correlation of the occupational composition between one county-industry and the rest of the county. This main result is robust, even when the spatial units are resized from counties to larger labor market regions. Input linkages appear to be relevant only at this larger regional scale. Overall, agglomeration economies differ substantially across industries. Only for a subset of industries, some positive evidence is detected for knowledge spillovers.     

Trade, migration and regional unemployment

A by now large literature in regional economics has greatly improved our understanding of the determinants of the observed spatial disparities in productivity. However, this literature neglects what seems to be a robust and persistent fact accompanying regional productivity differences: high productivity regions also have lower unemployment than low productivity regions. In this paper, we set out a model in the New Economic Geography (NEG)/job search tradition to explore the theoretical determinants of this fact. We find that the same forces producing regional agglomeration and productivity differences also generate persistent unemployment disparities. Moreover, we highlight a contrast between the short-run and long-run effects of migration on regional unemployment. In particular, migration from the periphery to the core may reduce unemployment disparities in the short-run, but exacerbates them in the long-run.     

Exploring reallocation’s apparent weak contribution to growth

Two recent meta-analyses use variants of the Baily et al. (Brookings Papers Econ Act Microecon 1:187–267, 1992) (BHC) decompositions to ask whether recent robust growth in aggregate labor productivity (ALP) across 25 countries is due to lower barriers to input reallocation. They find weak gains from measured reallocation and strong within-plant productivity gains. We show these findings may be because BHC indices decompose ALP growth using plant-level output-per-labor (OL) as a proxy for the marginal product of labor and changes in OL as a proxy for changes in plant-level productivity. We provide simple examples to show that (1) reallocation growth from labor should track marginal changes in labor weighted by the marginal product of labor, (2) BHC reallocation growth can be positively correlated, negatively correlated, or uncorrelated with actual growth arising from the reallocation of inputs, and that (3) BHC indices can mistake growth from reallocation as growth from productivity, principally because OL is neither a perfect index of marginal products nor plant-level productivity. We then turn to micro-level data from Chile, Colombia, and Slovenia, and we find for the first two that BHC indices report weak or negative growth from labor reallocation. Using the reallocation definition based on marginal products we find a positive and robust role for labor reallocation in all three countries and a reduced role of plant-level technical efficiency in growth. We close by exploring potential corrections to the BHC decompositions but here we have limited success.     

Tax Competition with Heterogeneous Firms

Abstract

This paper studies tax competition in an economic geography model that allows for agglomeration economies with trade costs and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves a large country charging a higher tax than a small nation. Lower trade costs lead to an intensification of competition, a drop in Nash tax rates and a narrowing of the gap. Since large, productive firms are naturally more sensitive to tax differences in our model, large firms are the crux of tax competition in our model. This also means that tax competition has consequences for the average productivity of big and small nations' industries; by lowering tax rates, a small nation can attract high-productivity firms.     

Should everybody be in services? The effect of servitization on manufacturing firm performance

The servitization of the manufacturing sector refers to the evolution of manufacturers' capabilities to offer services as complements to or substitutes for the goods that they produce. A vast literature has described these strategies and has shown that this phenomenon is widespread and growing in most developed economies. However, very little systematic evidence of the extent or consequences of servitization based on a comprehensive data set of firms exists. In this paper, we provide such evidence using exhaustive data for French manufacturing firms between 1997 and 2007. We find that the vast majority of French manufacturers sell services in addition to producing goods. The shift toward services is growing steadily but at a slow pace. We also estimate the impact of servitization on firm performance. Controlling for various sources of endogeneity bias, our most conservative results show that firms that start selling services increase their profitability by 0.4%, their employment by 2.1%, and their total sales by 0.6%. For small businesses, we also find a positive impact on the production of goods. We also uncover strong heterogeneity across manufacturing industries.     

Agglomeration economies and university program creation in the knowledge economy

Existing academic literature on the relationship between agglomeration economies and university activities is both under-theorized and relatively sparse in terms of empirical examination. This paper addresses each of these voids by contributing and analyzing a market model of pro-revenue education program creation such as graduate-level executive business education (e.g. EMBA) that reveals some intriguing characteristics. For instance, it shows that demand for these pro-revenue programs is inelastic and therefore uniquely determines their availability. More specifically, we show that through agglomeration economies these types of education programs are more likely to emanate from universities located in metropolitan areas and from less academically prestigious universities. Regression analysis of a cross-section of national public universities lends support to important facets of our formal model by suggesting that agglomeration economies continue to increase the probability of offering EMBA programs through a city size of approximately 2.12 million and that the probability that a given business school will offer an EMBA is negatively related to the academic prestige of the institution to which it is affiliated.     

Spillovers from universities: Evidence from the land-grant program

This paper estimates the short- and long-run effects of universities on geographic clustering of economic activity, labor market composition and local productivity and presents evidence of local spillovers from universities. I treat the designation of land-grant universities in the 1860s as a natural experiment after controlling for the confounding factors with a combination of synthetic control methods and event-study analyses. Three key results are obtained. First, the designation increased local population density by 6 percent within 10 years and 45 percent in 80 years. Second, the designation did not change the relative size of local manufacturing sector. Third, the designation enhanced local manufacturing output per worker by $2136 (1840 dollars; 57 percent) in 80 years while the short-run effects were negligible. This positive effect on the productivity in non-education sectors suggests the existence of local spillovers from universities. Over an 80-year horizon, my results indicate that the increase in manufacturing productivity reflects both the impact of direct spillovers from universities and general agglomeration economies that arise from the increase in population.     

Testing for predictability in equity returns for European transition markets

This paper presents empirical evidence of short and long-run predictability in stock returns for European transition economies. We employ variance ratios with a bootstrap methodology to test for short-run predictability, which is present in most countries. We also estimate Hurst exponents to test for long-range dependence, and find evidence of such. Furthermore, we find evidence of strong time-varying long-range dependence in these economies stock returns, which is in line with evidence of multifractality of equity returns.     

City size and urban labor productivity in China: New evidence from spatial city-level panel data analysis

The previous literature has generally found that most Chinese cities were undersized in the 1990s. However, little is known about how urban agglomeration in China has evolved since the country began to experience much faster urbanization and deep marketization after 2000. Based on panel data of 281 cities between 2000 and 2013, our spatial panel data regression results show that the scale impact of city size on urban productivity appears to have an inverted U shape, and its effect will grow when the cities’ industrial structure becomes more dominated by the service sector. There are also significant spatial interactions and spatial heterogeneity of urban agglomeration among Chinese cities. Furthermore, we compute the optimal size for each city and find that most Chinese cities are still undersized in recent years. Based on our findings, we argue that the Chinese government should focus on promoting sufficient growth of medium sized cities in its new urbanization strategy.     

Determinants of total factor productivity in former Soviet Union economies: A stochastic frontier approach

This paper investigates the process of GDP generation in former Soviet Union (FSU) economies to provide an understanding of the impact of technology channels on countries’ efficiency. We apply a stochastic frontier approach to 15 FSU economies over the period 1995–2008 and find that FDI and human capital improve countries’ technical efficiency. Furthermore, we show that these factors also have a positive impact on total factor productivity (TFP), which, in turn, improves real GDP growth. Hence, our results suggest that FSU countries should promote public policies that provide incentives to attract foreign investment and enhance domestic education in order to improve their economic growth. Additionally, our empirical evidence argues against the resource curse hypothesis. We also show, by computing efficiency change and technological change indices at the country level, that FSU economies benefit more from exploiting technological progress than from catching up to the best practice frontier.     

Inequality and Growth in European Regions: Towards a Place-based Approach

Abstract

Does agglomeration matter for growth? This paper addresses this question by evaluating the impact that intra-regional income distribution has on regional growth in Europe. By using a spatially augmented Solow growth model, we investigate the convergence process among 188 EU regions between 1991 and 2004 and extend the traditional growth models to account for the impact of regional inequality on growth, as well as the effects of interaction among regions. Our assumption is that existing levels of inequality between sub-regional territorial units could positively contribute to regional economic growth in Europe, through the positive effects generated by the emergence of agglomeration economies. Our results show that while we cannot find any overall significant relationship in Europe between agglomeration and growth, once we distinguish between Objective 1 and Non-objective 1 regions we are able to find that agglomeration positively impacts subsequent growth, but only in the less developed regions.     

The importance of common cyclical features in VAR analysis: a Monte-Carlo study

Despite the commonly held belief that aggregate data display short-run comovement, there has been little discussion about the econometric consequences of this feature of the data. We use exhaustive Monte-Carlo simulations to investigate the importance of restrictions implied by common-cyclical features for estimates and forecasts based on vector autoregressive models. First, we show that the “best” empirical model developed without common cycle restrictions need not nest the “best” model developed with those restrictions. This is due to possible differences in the lag-lengths chosen by model selection criteria for the two alternative models. Second, we show that the costs of ignoring common cyclical features in vector autoregressive modelling can be high, both in terms of forecast accuracy and efficient estimation of variance decomposition coefficients. Third, we find that the Hannan–Quinn criterion performs best among model selection criteria in simultaneously selecting the lag-length and rank of vector autoregressions.     

Productivity, convergence and policy: a study of OECD countries and industries

This paper analyses trends in labour productivity and its underlying determinants in a panel of OECD countries from 1979 to 2002. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to estimate a Malmquist measure of multifactor productivity (MFP) change. We decompose the growth in labour productivity into (i) net technological change (ii) input biased technical change (IBTC) (iii) efficiency change and (iv) capital accumulation. We analyse the effect of each of these factors in the transition towards the equilibrium growth paths of both labour productivity and per capita GDP for the OECD countries, controlling for the effects of different policies and institutions. The results indicate that on average gaps in productivity or income levels are narrowing down although there is no evidence to suggest that the entire OECD area comprises a single convergence “club”. Using kernel estimation methods we find that that labour productivity and per capita GDP are settling toward a twin peak (bimodal) distribution. Panel unit root tests over an extended (1960–2001) period provide general support for the convergence hypothesis. Analysis of the contributions of productivity growth within industries and sectoral composition changes show that aggregate productivity change is predominantly driven by ‘net’ within sector effects with very little contribution emerging from sectoral shifts (the ‘in-between’ static or dynamic effects resulting from higher or above average productivity industries gaining employment shares or low productivity industries losing shares).     

AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES IN JAPAN: TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY, GROWTH AND UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper examines if the effects of agglomeration economies are manifested in technical efficiency and generate faster economic growth and higher (lower) levels of employment (unemployment). Using the prefecture level data for each of the two-digit groups of industries in Japan, it estimates a region-specific technical efficiency index based on the stochastic frontier production function framework. The factor analysis shows that in most of the industry-groups, efficiency has a positive association with external scale variable(s). Though the relationship is not very strong, it would be erroneous to ignore the effect of agglomeration economies on efficiency. For some light goods industries, the agglomeration effect is relatively stronger. Economic growth varies positively with external scale variable(s) and the unemployment rate tends to fall with respect to growth and concentration. This suggests that measures against industrial concentration may be counter-productive, particularly in the context of globalization when countries greatly need to raise productivity.     

Impact of an unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI: Evidence from transition countries

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of an unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI in transition economies. We make an attempt to overcome some problems associated with previous studies; the aggregation problem, inadequate measures of volatility, short-run focus and the endogeneity problem. Using a GARCH specification, we focus on long-run volatility, while we control for the endogeneity problem by applying SYS-GMM estimation. The obtained results show that the impact of the unexplained component of real exchange rate volatility on FDI differs among economic activities since 2000. As part of the re-estimation exercise, we use two alternative measures of volatility to avoid arbitrariness. The obtained results are to a large extent in accordance with the first one.     

转移支付能提升产业集聚水平吗?

本文应用Riou(2006)的研究框架,分析转移支付对产业集聚水平的影响,发现转移支付有利于提高产业集聚水平,但地区间竞争会降低转移支付效率;同时转移支付存在一个最优规模。利用1995～2008年中国省级面板数据进行实证检验,研究表明,中国的转移支付水平与产业集聚之间呈现"倒U形"关系,转移支付和地区竞争对产业集聚的影响存在地区性差异,东部地区的转移支付效率相对较高。因此,需要综合利用政策手段,提高中西部地区的产业集聚水平。     

SEMI‐NONPARAMETRIC ESTIMATION OF CONSUMER SEARCH COSTS

This paper studies the estimation of the distribution of non‐sequential search costs. We show that the search cost distribution is identified by combining data from multiple markets with common search technology but varying consumer valuations, firms' costs, and numbers of competitors. To exploit such data optimally, we provide a new method based on semi‐nonparametric estimation. We apply our method to a dataset of online prices for memory chips and find that the search cost density is essentially bimodal, such that a large fraction of consumers searches very little, whereas a smaller fraction searches a relatively large number of stores. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urban Agglomeration and Dispersion: A Synthesis of Alonso and Krugman

Urban agglomeration becomes increasingly important because of the globalization of world economies. This paper is a general equilibrium analysis of urban agglomeration economies due to product variety, and agglomeration diseconomies due to intra-city congestion in a two-city system framework. Special attention is paid to the impacts of transportation cost decrease on urban concentration and dispersion. Our main result is that dispersion necessarily takes place when the transportation cost is sufficiently low. We also conduct numerical calculations using specific parameter values, and depict a structural transition from dispersion to agglomeration, and then re-dispersion when the transportation costs decrease monotonically over time. Finally, we observe that dispersion is usually bad as compared to agglomeration, from a welfare point of view.     

Foreign banks and short-term macroeconomic fluctuations: Do financial development and regions matter?

In this paper, we investigate the association between bank integration, measured with the share of foreign banks in the banking industry, and macroeconomic volatility in emerging economies. We find a negative and significant relationship between bank integration and short-run fluctuations in output, consumption and investment, controlling for financial development, bank concentration and the real effective exchange rate. However, this relationship is found to be positive at high levels of financial development. We also explore the association at the regional level and show that the presence of foreign banks in Latin America is negatively and significantly correlated with macroeconomic volatility both in normal times and times of crisis. Despite widespread concerns in emerging Europe, which experienced greater financial vulnerability during the global financial crisis, we find no significant association between growth volatilities and bank integration.     

Work Recognition and Labor Productivity: Evidence from French Data

We empirically investigate whether labor productivity is related to work recognition. Using survey data about a large sample of French firms (N = 5309), we find that firms in which employees think their work is recognized are likely to report higher labor productivity, compared with firms where employees do not feel recognized. Our estimation results also suggest that labor productivity is strongly related to wages. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.