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We present a spatial and time-continuous Ramsey-type equilibrium model for households and firms that interact on a spatial domain to model labor mobility in the presence of commuting costs. After discretization in space and time, we obtain a mixed complementarity problem that represents the spatial equilibrium model. We prove existence of equilibria using the theory of finite-dimensional variational inequalities and derive a tailored diagonalization method to solve the resulting large-scale instances. Finally, we present a case study that highlights the influence of commuting costs and show that the model allows to analyze transitory effects of industrial agglomeration that emerge and vanish over time as in the real economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transportation infrastructure networks are important for regional development and affect the efficiency of trade and regional cooperation. By establishing a three-city model, this paper identifies the effect of changing the transportation network (i.e., cities located at the centre of a transportation network with locational advantages that diminish with the flattening of the network structure). Constructing transportation lines between non-central cities promotes the development of these cities and negatively affects the central city simultaneously. This paper verifies the existence of this effect through the representative case of the Hangzhou Bay Bridge: the two non-central cities connected by the bridge experienced growth in their economic performance, while the central city experienced a decline in performance. The welfare analysis of this case shows that although structural changes in the transport network had heterogeneous effects on the central and non-central cities, welfare improvements were achieved overall. The results of this study suggest that planners of transportation infrastructure could achieve Karldor-Hicks improvements in total welfare and reductions in regional development gaps by optimising a transportation network structure within a certain range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows the potentials of georeferenced data for labor market research. We review developments in the literature and highlight areas that can benefit from exploiting georeferenced data. Moreover, we share our experiences in geocoding administrative employment data including wage and socioeconomic information of almost the entire German workforce between 2000 and 2017. To make the data easily accessible for research, we create 1-square-kilometer grid cells aggregating a rich set of labor market characteristics and sociodemographics of unprecedented spatial precision. These unique data provide detailed insights into inner-city distributions for all German cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Accordingly, we provide an extensive series of maps in the Additional file 1 and describe Berlin and Munich in greater detail. The small-scale maps reveal substantial differences in various labor market aspects within and across cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we propose a novel robustness measure for networks, which we refer to as Effective Resistance Centrality of a vertex (or an edge), defined as the relative drop of the Kirchhoff index due to deletion of this vertex (edge) from the network. Indeed, we provide a local robustness measure, able to catch which is the effect of either a specific vertex or a specific edge on the network robustness. The validness of this new measure is illustrated on some typical graphs and on a wide variety of well-known model networks. Furthermore, we analyse the topology of the US domestic flight connections. In particular, we investigate the role that airports play in maintaining the structure of the entire network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers approaches to analyzing and setting directions in the development of Siberia. The view of Siberia widely adopted by the scientific community, taking it to be a socially and economically linked region, is shown to be largely premature. For 60 years, the Institute of Economics and Industrial Engineering, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences has been developing and elaborating approaches that can provide a comprehensive rationale for the development of Siberia in line with modern spatial economics concepts (creating and distributing value in the interests of Siberia and its individual regions). The approaches developed at the institute make it possible to analyze the synergistic effects from the integrating efforts of individual territories within the Siberian macroregion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies find various, and often small or negligible, impacts of floodplain designation on home sales prices in the United States, calling into question the U.S.'s National Flood Insurance Program's (NFIP) effectiveness at internalizing flood risk into the residential property market. However, studies also tend to focus only on standalone homes, although a substantial portion of the U.S. housing market, particularly within designated floodplains, consists of condominiums: single-unit residences that are bundled with an ownership share in common property. This study investigates the price impact of floodplain designation for condominiums and for standalone properties in Boulder County, Colorado, U.S., and finds a strong impact for condominiums but none for standalone properties. Results are consistent across hedonic price estimation and non-parametric matching estimation. Numerous factors may contribute to this difference, including differences in the pre-transaction provision of flood insurance cost information and whether maintaining ongoing flood insurance is compulsory. These results have implications for the NFIP and offer insights for policy interventions for internalizing risks more generally. They also caution against generalizing from the experience of the NFIP without detailed consideration of the contexts and specific conditions in which it is applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the autonomous formation of regions with local nonmarket production in the presence of profit-maximizing producers. The approach is based on a spatial equilibrium model with a linear transport cost. A Hotelling duopoly model is extended by allowing the households, uniformly distributed on a line, to become local producers. Due to capacity restrictions, local production covers at most a given percentage of a fixed household demand, whereas the remaining portion is bought from one of the profit-maximizing suppliers. Local production is pro-competitive, implying a lower equilibrium price than the standard Hotelling model, in spite of capacity restrictions. A price equilibrium where the firms are located symmetrically within the quartiles may exist, assuming a sufficient degree of self-sufficiency of local production. A higher level of capacity restrictions implies a higher equilibrium price. Local production may emerge as an equilibrium outcome, assuming the production does not require strong economies of scale and assuming the households are willing to invest in local production. Due to imperfect competition, the equilibrium number of local producers is positive whenever local production is optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of resilience has been receiving both theoretical and empirical attention in recent years, from different disciplinary fields, including spatial economics where resilience is becoming a 'popular' term. In particular, the concept of spatial economic resilience seems to assume slightly different interpretations. Starting from the basic definitions of resilience, which stem from ecology, this paper aims to highlight the similarities and the differences in the various analyses of resilience, in order to offer some insights into its use in the spatial economics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local production is a central theme in sustainable development and is of increasing current interest in e.g. food and energy production. This paper extends the classical Hotelling duopoly model of spatial competition to allowing for local production at the household level. The model is applied to study the existence and efficiency of a price equilibrium in the presence of local production. The optimal solution to the corresponding planning problem minimizing the sum of the resource costs is derived. Assuming the duopolists are symmetrically located on a line, the equilibrium number of local producers ('ecological entrepreneurs') exceeds the optimal number. However, local production implies a lower equilibrium price than the standard Hotelling model and may extend the range of the symmetric locations of the duopolists for which a price equilibrium exists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a spatial economic model under network externalities, assuming a quadratic transport cost function. A classical circular model is applied where the consumers, each with a fixed demand, are uniformly distributed along the circumference of a circle. Assuming symmetric locations of profit-maximizing suppliers, a unique symmetric price equilibrium is derived under both positive and negative network externalities. The price equilibrium is obtained using the tridiagonality property of the demand system. The equilibrium price is higher with negative network externalities than the price without externalities whereas the converse is true with positive network externalities. The efficiency loss of the free entry equilibrium is studied in terms of the price of anarchy. Numerical experiments suggest that the price of anarchy is robust to weak externalities but can be significant under strong network externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water scarcity is becoming an increasingly relevant issue in many regions of the world as demand for water continues to grow. As a result, the need for finding measures that efficiently allocate increasingly scarce water resources has become a primary topic on the agendas of many water resource management authorities. This paper presents an innovative approach that provides further insight into the connection between hydrological, environmental, and economic aspects along a river basin. In short, it analyzes how land rents along a river basin are affected by managing water pollution along a river basin, given certain hydrological characteristics of the river basin. Results show that, without the implementation of a water management system to control water quality, the negative external effects of upstream water discharges on downstream locations can be internalized through a decrease in downstream land rents. However, the analysis presented in this paper also reveals that it is not only the absence or the presence of a water management system that has a significant impact on the real estate market along the river basin. Moreover, the market outcome also varies with the type of water resources management system implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his writing, analyses, and commentaries, Walter Isard contributed significantly to economic geography, inspiring a generation of economic geographers with seminal texts on industrial location and spatial economics and methods of regional analysis – a line of argumentation that explicitly incorporated abstract economic reasoning into an otherwise largely descriptive and inventory-based subdiscipline of geography. His circumscribed view of regional development and industrial location helped precipitate the emergence of the critical turn in economic geography in the late 1970s. He was the one early modern 20th century economics author to successfully wed economics and a certain perspective on space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nitrate leaching forms an important environmental problem because it causes pollution of groundwater and surface water, and adds to already problematic eutrophication. This study analyses the impact of reductions in nitrate leaching on land cover decisions of dairy farms, of which the activities make an important contribution to nitrate leaching. As the level of nitrate leaching depends on groundwater depth as well as on the supply of nitrogen, spatial variation in groundwater levels will cause a spatial variation in land cover under restrictions on nitrate leaching. A non-linear partial optimisation model for the economic and ecological aspects of the problem were used to show how land cover and dairy farms' financial balances change when nitrate losses are reduced. The model is spatially explicit, and describes nitrate leakage and yields of maize and grass as a function of groundwater depth, including the effects of various grazing systems. The model analyses the decisions of a risk neutral agent who minimises costs under the following constraints: (i) production, feed requirements and mass balances for fodder; (ii) constraints for nitrate leaching. Economic costs are attributed to increased costs of fodder and processing of manure when nitrate restrictions are tightened. An important result of the study is the variation in compliance costs and land cover for maize and grass production brought about by spatial variation in groundwater depth. While the effects are negligible for some shallow groundwater classes, it is extremely difficult in other classes – if not impossible – to obtain the EU standard of maximum admissible losses of 34 kg N ha−1 at low costs. The study shows an important reduction in land cover by maize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does a country‘s long-term growth depend on what happensin countries that are nearby? Such linkages could occur for avariety of reasons, including demand and technology spillovers.We present a series of tests to determine the existence of suchrelationships and the forms that they might take. We find thata country‘s growth rate is closely related to that of nearbycountries and show that this correlation reflects more than theexistence of common shocks. Trade alone does not appear responsiblefor these linkages either. In addition, we find that being neara large market contributes to growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]