Creating an Environment for Economic Growth: Creativity,Entrepreneurship or Human Capital?

Scholars and policymakers interested in the growth and prosperity of regions have long recognized that talent and knowledge are fundamental. Yet the question is what types of talent are needed in a growing twenty‐first‐century economy: human capital, creativity and innovation, or entrepreneurship? The latter we define broadly to include any type of risk taking, and not only radical innovation. The literature does not clearly point to one factor as being the most essential. This study assesses this question separately for rural and urban United States (US) counties. We find that human capital––measured by educational attainment––is considerably more conducive to employment growth than the share of creative occupations. Likewise, the share of small and medium businesses is also very conducive to local growth, although this does not apply to the self‐employment share. Rural and urban areas experience similar patterns, although the magnitude thereof tends to be larger for urban counties, whereas high‐technology employment share has had a positive effect in rural areas. Policy conclusions suggest that enhancing small business development and increasing educational attainment are the two strategies that are most likely to succeed.     

Complements or substitutes? Task specialization by gender and nativity in Spain

Learning about the impact of immigration on the labor market outcomes of natives is a topic of major concern for immigrant-receiving countries. Using data from Spain, where the immigrant population has risen from 4% to 13% within a decade, we find that immigration appears to have affected the task specialization of natives without affecting their employment levels. However, the impact of immigration on the relative task supply of natives is twice as great in Spain as in the United States. The magnitude of the immigration impact in a country with a large share of immigrants originating from Spanish-speaking countries suggests that host country language proficiency is not the sole factor driving the observed impact. Additionally, the analysis reveals significant gender differences in the impact of immigration on the relative task supply of natives, possibly resting on the occupational concentration of immigrants and native occupational segregation patterns by gender, among other factors.     

Residential Building Permits in Urban Counties: 1990–1997

This paper presents simple empirical models of residential building permits for urban counties in the United States for the period 1990–1997. Building permits, as a percentage of the housing stock, are greater the larger are population growth, the proportion of units that are old (built before 1940), and the proportion of units that are new. A higher initial vacancy rate reduces building permits.     

Trade and factor intensity,and the transmission of the global shock to labor: A panel analysis of the fall of the labor income share in the Mexican manufacturing sector

The paper studies the fall of the labor income share in Mexico, contrasting the role of trade and factor intensity as transmission channels of the China shock of 2001. It finds that, while the skill, technological and —more surprisingly— trade intensity of Mexican industries were largely irrelevant, capital intensity played a key role: in particular, the higher was the industries’ initial capital intensity, the more vulnerable they were to the transmission of the global shock to labor. The finding is consistent with the proposition that industrial integration, concentrated in industries that are capital-intensive from the perspective of developing countries, facilitated the transmission of the shock. Results come from the estimation of panel equations for the annual change in the labor share across Mexican manufacturing industries, where transmission is measured by the correlation between changes in the United States and Mexican industry labor shares.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF CAPITAL INTENSITY IN FOREIGN-OWNED MANUFACTURING ACROSS U.S. REGIONS

This paper empirically tests hypothesized influences on the capital intensity of foreign direct investment (FDI) among the 48 contiguous United States. A theoretical profit maximizing model of the firm is developed linking capital intensity to traditional variables (the prices of labor and capital services); the model also takes account of the price of energy, agglomeration effects, educational levels, the importance of labor unions, and state and local public capital. The main focus is on the effects of public capital on the capital intensity of FDI. Public capital is disaggregated as follows: highway, sewer and water, and other (primarily buildings). The operational model defines FDI as the 1986 gross value of property, plant, and equipment of manufacturing affiliates of firms with headquarters in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Findings are reported both for total manufacturing and for manufacturing disaggregated into five industry groups. Generally, the results emphasize that highway infrastructure and sewer and water public capital act as powerful incentives to attract capital-intensive FDI across the 48 contiguous United States.     

Immigration and firm productivity: evidence from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database

Previous studies on the impact of immigration on productivity in developed countries remain inconclusive, and most analyses are abstracted from firms where production actually takes place. This study examines the empirical relationship between immigration and firm-level productivity in Canada. It uses the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database that tracks firms over time and matches firms with their employees. The study finds that there is a positive association between changes in the share of immigrants in a firm and changes in firm productivity. This positive effect of immigration on firm productivity is small, but it is stronger over a longer period. The effect tends to be larger for low-skilled immigrants as compared with highly-skilled workers, as firm productivity growth is more strongly associated with changes in the share of recent immigrants (relative to established immigrants), and immigrants who intended to work in non-high skilled occupations (relative to immigrants who intended to work in high-skilled occupations). Those differences are more pronounced in technology-intensive and knowledge-based industries. Immigration is found to have little estimated effects on capital intensity in a firm. Finally, this study finds that high skill and lower skill immigrants have similar effects on average worker earnings arising from the positive productivity effect of immigration, but only skilled immigrants are associated with higher firm profits.

     

The ‘Black Metropolis' in the American Urban System of the Early Twentieth Century: Harlem,Bronzeville and Beyond

By defining and measuring a dimension of the Black Metropolis in terms of occupational representation, this study advances research on the urban black communities of the early twentieth‐century United States. Census data show that: (1) Bronzeville (Chicago) was the premier Black Metropolis overall and the black communities of urban‐industrial centers in the Midwest had locational advantages that rivaled those of Harlem (New York) with respect to the rise of the black professional and entrepreneurial classes; (2) The standing of Harlem as a preeminent Black Metropolis was due mainly to opportunities generated by unique features of New York that aided blacks' entry into an extensive array of artistic, entertainment and mass media occupations; (3) The black community of Washington, DC, was the only substantial Black Metropolis below the Mason‐Dixon Line because of advantages that derived from the city's location above areas of the lower South and from its status as the capital of the US federal government; (4) In general, the northern Black Metropolis was characterized more by opportunities for blacks to participate in politics and public life and to create vital cultural institutions than by opportunities for blacks to economically gain through professions or businesses.     

Old homes, externalities, and poor neighborhoods. A model of urban decline and renewal

This paper investigates urban decline and renewal in the United States using three panels that follow neighborhoods on a geographically consistent basis over extended periods of time. Findings indicate that change in neighborhood economic status is common, averaging roughly 13 percent per decade; roughly two-thirds of neighborhoods studied in 1950 were of quite different economic status fifty years later. Panel unit root tests for 35 MSAs indicate that neighborhood economic status is a stationary process, consistent with long-running cycles of decline and renewal. In Philadelphia County, a complete cycle appears to last up to 100 years. Aging housing stocks and redevelopment contribute to these patterns, as do local externalities associated with social interactions. Lower-income neighborhoods appear to be especially sensitive to the presence of individuals that provide social capital. Many of the factors that drive change at the local level have large and policy relevant effects.     

美国量化宽松货币政策下的中国货币政策思考

本轮全球性大危机的一个重要特征是美国量化宽松货币政策的长期持续。美国持续的量化宽松政策对作为生产型经济体的中国将产生长期不利影响。本文分析了美国持续量化宽松货币政策对中国的对外贸易和资本流动两个层面的不利冲击,得出了人民币对外升值与对内贬值的压力将长期伴随中国经济的观点,在此基础上指出中国中央银行应谨慎论证和抉择货币政策"币值稳定"目标值:在生产要素价格低估下人民币不宜过快升值,传统的通胀预警指标需要修正和提高;提出了未来货币政策总趋势应该是中性的、应注重总量调控与结构调整并重等政策建议。     

Resource allocation at an income-sharing community: An application of Elinor Ostrom's commons framework

Elinor Ostrom's framework for commons management is used here to analyse ethnographic material from long-term fieldwork in an income-sharing community in the United States. By requiring participants to pool labour and share resources for survival and well-being, income-sharing communities align with Ostrom's allocation design for common-pool resources. These communities can figure as a node within the hybrid and polycentric networks designated by Ostrom for equitable and effective commons management, which requires both effective institutional arrangements and shared social capital among system participants. While a case is made for analysing resource-sharing practices at these communities with Elinor Ostrom's framework, shortcomings and possible future directions are indicated.     

Impact of supplier relationship management practices on buying firm performance: comparison of the United States and China

In 2007, Krause, Handfield, and Tyler examined the relationship between various aspects of social capital and buyer performance in the buyer-supplier dyad by surveying buying firms within the United States. This study extends the (Krause et al. in J Oper Manag 25:528–545, 2007) study by replicating it in two different contexts (industry and China). The original study was conducted in the automotive and electronic industries in the United States, while the current study was conducted in both manufacturing and service industries in the United States and China. We found that the difference of information sharing between the two United States populations is the only difference attributed to industry differences. Overall, study results indicate that buyer commitment positively impacted buying firm performance in China; while buyer commitment and shared values impacted buying firm performance in the United States. These findings suggest that certain aspects of social capital are important in China, but differences do exist between the two countries that may be attributed to culture. Therefore, researchers should consider the impact of country culture when conducting studies in China.     

How do very open economies adjust to large immigration flows? Evidence from Spanish regions

We study the labor market effects of the large immigration wave in Spain between 2001 and 2006. In this period the foreign-born share increased from 6% to 13%, with a total inflow exceeding three million immigrants. Our analysis exploits the large variation in the size of immigration flows across Spain's regions. To identify causal effects, we take advantage of the fact that immigrants' location choices were strongly driven by early migrant settlements that arrived during the 1980s. We find that the relatively unskilled migration inflows did not affect the wages or employment rates of unskilled workers in the receiving regions. The growth of the unskilled labor force was absorbed mostly through increases in total employment. This increase did not originate in changes in the composition of regional output, but was instead driven by changes in skill intensity at the industry level. Regions that received a large inflow of unskilled immigrants increased the intensity of use of the now more abundant (unskilled) labor, relative to other regions. The key industries responsible for this absorption were retail, construction, hotels and restaurants and domestic services. These results are inconsistent with standard open economy models but are in line with recent empirical studies for the United States and Germany.     

美国城市土地管理及对北京的借鉴

认为美国的城市土地管理具有良好的法律基础.注重将土地资源利用与资源节约、提升城市生活水平与控制城市规模相结合;介绍了美国城市土地管理的三大手段:行政分区、市场机制与规划.     

HUMAN CAPITAL AND URBAN GROWTH IN ITALY, 1981–2001

Over the last decades of the XX century, human capital has emerged as a critical source of agglomeration economies fueling urban growth in advanced economies. Focusing on the Italian case, this paper assesses the contribution of human capital to urban growth, the latter gauged by employment growth between 1981 and 2001. A 10% higher share of college‐educated residents prompted a higher growth in employment in the 0.5–2.2% range. These results hold controlling for a wide set of urban characteristics and using an instrumental variable approach. By exploiting a spatial localization model, we disentangle the estimated effect into two components related to higher productivity and to higher life quality, respectively. We found that the former contributed to more than 60% of the effect at municipal level, and to over 90% at the wider local labor market level.     

Determinants of corporate borrowing: Some evidence from the Indian corporate structure

In contrast to previous empirical work on capital structure, which is mainly confined to the United States and a few other advanced countries, this paper attempts to study the capital structure choice of developing countries through a case study of the Indian corporate sector. The paper shows that the optimal capital structure choice is influenced by factors such as growth, cash flow, size, and product and industry characteristics.     

Inequality and catching-up under decreasing marginal impatience

This paper examines how endogenous time preference interacts with inequalities in economic development. We consider two distinct groups of households with intrinsic inequality (e.g., capitalists and workers), and show that (i) under decreasing marginal impatience (DMI), an unequal society may be preferable for poor households than an egalitarian one in which every household owns an equal share of asset; (ii) poor households tend to benefit more under DMI than CMI (constant marginal impatience) from positive shocks; (iii) inequality exhibits a sharp inverted-U shape as more people become rich, which should be good news for developing countries in catching up; and (iv) a tax on capital income reduces poor households’ income when the fraction of the rich is sufficiently small. We also examine immigration and discuss capital mobility.     

The changing geography of major causes of death among middle age white Americans, 1939-1981.

Urban areas, especially the Northeast, are assumed to have the highest death rates from chronic diseases in the United States. Based on analysis of age-adjusted death rates of the white population 35-64 from 1939-1941 through 1979-1981, it is shown that chronic disease rates in the urban Northeast and Midwest have declined compared to the rest of the United States. High rates of chronic as well as traumatic causes of death now characterize the South. Hypotheses are offered to explain these changes, including changes in lifestyle, differences in state government policies, the changing geography of industry and ethnic populations, and the spread of medical care.     

高科技中小企业风险投资国际比较及借鉴

本文通过对美国、英国、日本等发达国家中小企业风险投资的经验进行比较分析,提出完善我国中小企业风险投资业的国际借鉴。     

The Kuznets curve of the rich

A long-standing interest in the relationship between inequality and sustainable growth continues to fascinate economists among other social scientists. It must be noted, however, that most empirical efforts have focussed on the income inequality–growth nexus, while studies on wealth inequality are much scarcer. This study attempts to fill such a gap in the literature by assessing the correspondence between the top 1 percent's wealth share and economic growth. Employing time series cointegration techniques, we study the experience of France and the United States from 1950 to 2014. Our estimates suggest that the output growth rate is an inverted-U-shaped function of the wealth share of the top 1 percent. The estimated relationship is robust to variations in control variables and estimation methods. We compute the local optimal wealth share, understood as the share of wealth compatible with the maximum growth rate, and show that France is growing close to its long-run potential, while the United States is significantly below its.     

雅戈尔：失重的惩罚

任何被视为奇迹的事物．往往都很难持续,因为他来自一个超越了常规的历程。2008年初,美国《商业周刊》公开点名表示了对雅戈尔脱离主业发展的质疑,并用略带嘲讽的口吻表示：“近来,除股票投资业务外,该公司的其他业务都已变得无足轻重。”不幸的是,雅戈尔终于没能承载住如此巨量的资本．当2008年下半年中国股市开始又一次过山车时．雅戈尔这个曾经的资本巨人也急速萎缩,曾被李如成搭建为纺织服装为主、股权投资和房地产投资搭档的三驾马车,两翼同时折断……