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Economic agglomeration has played a key function in China's economic transformation. Meanwhile, structural adjustment and external pressure to reduce carbon emission necessitate a deeper investigation into its relationship with carbon productivity. This paper measures economic agglomeration and carbon productivity of 281 cities in China in 2003–2017. With the purpose of exploring the spatial effect of economic agglomeration on carbon productivity, a spatial Durbin model is constructed. In addition, the mediation effect model is also adopted for examining the transmission mechanism of economic scale and technological progress on economic agglomeration as well as carbon productivity. A heterogeneity test is also carried out to uncover the varying effects of economic agglomeration on carbon productivity. The empirical results suggest that economic agglomeration raises carbon productivity not only in the local cities but also in the neighbouring ones. The impact of economic agglomeration on carbon productivity becomes more potent as the level of economic agglomeration increases. For cities with low level of economic agglomeration, the effect is mainly achieved through the expansion of economic scale, but for cities with high level of economic agglomeration, the effect is mainly achieved through technological progress. Therefore, we suggest encouraging carbon productivity improvement through technology effect in cities with high economic agglomeration level, while enhancing carbon productivity through scale effect in cities with low economic agglomeration level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional economic resilience is the ability of the regional economy to hold out when there is an economic shock. Interconnectedness between actors in a regional economy is a crucial factor in regional economic resilience, especially for the adaptive resilience. However, extant studies have analyzed the overall regional resilience competencies in terms of advanced technology, productivity input factors (human and physical capital), and agglomeration economies. This study aims to operationalize the concept of the regional economy's network characteristics and empirically analyze the relationship between network characteristics and the resilience of regional economy. We posited the hypotheses on the relationship between the network characteristics of regional industrial ecosystems and resilience. We use the automobile parts yearbook of the South Korea Automobile Association from 1997 to 2019. We built automobile industry transaction data by digitalizing the paper-based records. It operationalized the concept of weak tie using modularity and skewness. As a result, an economic ecosystem with weak ties showed better performance in economic resilience. This study argues that the regional industrial ecosystem is an important, but neglected, factor for the sustainable development of the regional economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban non-core region land exploitation and population immigration toward urban non-core areas, two fundamentals of urbanization in China, challenge the environment; however, the pollution effect remains unclear. Using prefecture-level data in China between 2003 and 2020, our study investigates the pollution effect of population-land spatial coupling in the urban non-core region. The empirical results demonstrate that excessive urban non-core region land expansion alone negatively impacts the environment. Meanwhile, outward spatial population distribution in a town, primarily measured by the relative proportion of the urban non-core region population size, directly aggravates environmental pollution on the one hand and indirectly improves the environment by alleviating the adverse effect of land-led urbanization. These findings remain robust under various regional heterogeneity analyses and still stand regardless of the investigated pollutants. The practical implications suggest that breaking through the population-land spatial coupling when the urban core region is small is advisable; meanwhile, efforts in maintaining the coupling, especially for areas with sizeable peripheral land exploitation, should be held. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the causal impact of communication infrastructure quality on growth and structural transformation. We use variation across US counties' Internet speeds in 2018 and build an instrument using ARPANET, a military network that preceded the modern Internet, with its location documented in historical government reports. We find that doubling Internet speeds increases the 4-year employment growth by 3.3–6.1 percentage points. Faster Internet shifts economic activity toward high-skilled services and away from non-tradeable services while increasing inequality. Industry linkages, capital-skill complementarity, and information and communication technology workers' sorting rationalize our results. Medium and small cities and rural areas drive our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exploits signals of capital pricing and availability in US cities which are obtained from uniquely detailed data on real estate investments. We identify how places were differently affected by the global financial crisis and provide insights which offer an alternative explanation of why US economic growth continues to experience spatial divergence after many decades of convergence. Investment pricing uncovers that before the crisis capital was allocated efficiently across localities, whereas the global financial shock favored large and prosperous places. These findings point to persistent post-crisis asymmetry in local capital market conditions and underscore the capital risk-safety aspects of agglomeration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates digital firm birth activity in municipalities in the urban hinterland of core cities in Germany. It conducts panel fixed-effect regressions for monocentric and polycentric urban labour market regions covering the years 1995–2017. The digital industry’s regional distribution is shaped significantly by the closest core cities: municipalities in monocentric urban regions (MURs) profit from urban population growth and universities’ general knowledge. Municipalities in polycentric urban regions (PURs), however, are affected by industry-specific externalities, that is, an above-average growth in the share of firm birth of their closest urban cores. Overall, agglomeration externalities experience spatial decay relative to the core size with all regions benefiting from their own industry-enhancing urbanization externalities as captured by population growth and universities.

ABSTRACTWe estimate the link between population density and labour productivity at the city level. An exogenous change in the agglomeration of some cities that occurred in Italy during the fascist dictatorship allows us to instrument the agglomeration proxy. We find evidence of a causal impact of density on productivity for the subpopulation of cities affected by the instrument. The estimated elasticity in our preferred specification is 0.252.

Abstract Reducing carbon emissions and attaining sustainable economic, social, and environmental development are vital components of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Previous research has overlooked the influence of the digital economy on urban carbon decoupling. To bridge this gap, this study employs GIS software and econometric models for analyzing the spatial distribution and characteristics of the digital economy and carbon decoupling and also investigates the direct, heterogeneous, and spatial effects of the digital economy on carbon decoupling. This study reveals: (1) A lesser digital economy presence in the northeast and northwest, while more developed in the Southeast Coast and municipalities directly under the Central Government. Cities with weak carbon decoupling are concentrated in Northeast and North China. (2) The digital economy and the decoupling of urban carbon emissions have spatial correlation and agglomeration characteristics. (3) The digital economy can contribute to decoupling carbon emissions in cities. (4) Improved urban carbon decoupling by the digital economy in central, eastern, and non-resource-based cities. (5) Spatial spillover effect in urban carbon emissions decoupling, yet the digital economy worsens nearby cities’ carbon decoupling due to a siphon effect. That research indicates that the digital economy holds significant promise not only in advancing human progress, bridging the digital divide, and fostering social development but also in driving the decoupling of urban carbon emissions.

This article investigates the impact of working from home (WFH) on the emergence and structure of monocentric cities. In the long run, WFH raises urban productivity only in sufficiently large cities. Business land rents fall while residential land rents decrease near the business district. Workers have incentives to adopt inefficiently high WFH schemes. In the short run, WFH yields mixed benefits for commuters and firms, which corroborates the low WFH adoption before the pandemic. Advances in digital technology increase the welfare benefits of WFH. Calibration exercises on European capital cities shed light on the quantitative impact of WFH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines economic resilience by combining high-frequency truck flows and the lockdown policy shock during COVID-19 in China. We discover that the truck flows in regions with higher levels of diversification and vertical integration see a smaller decrease in response to the COVID-19 shock. Dynamically, such moderating effects of diversification and vertical integration get smaller with the recovery of interregional economic linkages. Diversification and integration also mitigate the negative impact from nonlocal infection cases. The association between the industrial structure attributes and economic resilience is more prominent in regions with lower centrality in the nationwide intercity truck flow network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between a region's population size and the match of college-educated workers to jobs that require a degree. Results show a positive relationship between degree match and county population size in the United States, with a 100,000-person increase in population associated with a 1.3-percentage point increase in the likelihood of a match. The analysis uses a person's grade point average in college to account for the potential sorting of higher-skilled workers into larger urban areas and the dataset has individuals across a wide range of regions from small rural areas to big cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the causal link between the geographical distance between firms and their main bank and the termination of main bank relationships, using the exogenous change in firm–main bank distances brought about by bank branch consolidations in Japan. Our findings are threefold. First, an increase in lending distance increases the likelihood that firms switch their main bank. Second, the average lending distance for firms that switched to a new main bank decreased after the switch. Third, the lending distance of new firm–main bank relationships after the switch had a positive impact on the probability of default of small firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor divergence between North and South has formed, and the high-speed rail (HSR) plays a key role in labor's agglomeration in China. Regarding China's HSR as a quasi-natural experiment, we construct a difference-in-difference (DID) model to explore the impact of HSR on the labor market of North and South China based on the panel data of 285 cities in China from 1998 to 2018. HSR significantly enhances labor quantity and relieves labor misallocation in South China, while has an insignificant effect on labor quality. It mainly improves the allocation efficiency of the labor market by the improved regional accessibility, which has obvious threshold effects on labor quantity at 2109.8 km from the northernmost part of China, respectively. Furthermore, Confucian culture (CC) weakens the impact of HSR on labor market especially for South China except strengthens that on northern labor quality. Therefore, the labor mobility between North and South China is the result of the combined effect of HSR's thrust and CC's pull, so policymakers should strengthen the construction of HSR network and increase the investment in southern education and northern public cultural construction to reduce barriers of labor mobility between North and South China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]