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We try to determine with the help of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition technique whether foreign workers are discriminated against in Russia. We use the Russian Ministry of Labor (Rostrud) data on migrants’ applications and the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS, provided by the Higher School of Economics) for the period 2009–2013. We show that there is significant discrimination against foreign workers. The average salary of Russian workers with the same level of productivity as migrants exceeds migrants’ average salary by 40%. The industries in which the workers are employed have made most substantial contribution to the discrimination gap. Moreover, there is evidence that the lower salaries of foreign workers do not reduce the salaries of Russians employed in similar positions.

This paper estimates a lifecycle model of consumption, housing choice, and migration in the presence of aggregate and regional shocks, using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The model delivers structural estimates of moving costs by ownership status, age, and family size that complement the previous literature. Using the model, I first show that migration elasticities vary substantially between renters and owners, and I estimate the consumption value of having the option to migrate across regions when there are regional shocks. This value is 19% of lifetime consumption on average, and it varies substantially with household type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the factors influencing the diffusion of residential photovoltaic systems. Factors examined are related to social attributes, such as population structure and living environment within neighborhoods and those close by, together with a neighbor effect revealed as a positive spatial dependency of the diffusion. To examine these factors simultaneously, the study applies a spatial econometric analysis, taking advantage of the availability of cumulative data on installed residential photovoltaic systems and census-based social attributes in about 4000 census blocks in Kyoto City, which include 1.47 million people. Results include: (1) an observed neighbor effect, especially between census blocks within a radius of 1000 m; (2) evidence that diffusion is positively influenced in a census block by lower population density and higher number of household members, as well as by lower ratios of detached houses and lower population densities in nearby census blocks; and (3) indication that diffusion is positively influenced by a higher proportion of young people through various mechanisms. To further facilitate the diffusion, implementing non-economic measures designed in light of the observed neighborhood influences is recommended, in addition to conventional economic support measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Community Rating System (CRS) program was implemented by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1990 as an optional program to encourage communities to voluntarily engage in flood mitigation initiatives. This article uses national census tract‐level data from 1980 to 2010 to estimate whether CRS participation and flood risk affect a community's local patterns of population change. We employ an instrumental‐variables strategy to address the potential endogeneity of CRS participation, based on community‐scale demographic factors that predict when a tract's host community joins the CRS. The results find significant effects of the CRS program and flood risk on population change. Taken together, the findings point to greater propensity for community‐scale flood management in areas with more newcomers and programs such as CRS stabilizing population, though not especially in flood‐prone areas. We observe the CRS neither displacing population toward lower‐risk areas nor attracting more people to flood‐prone areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model of Tiebout sorting based on decentralized income taxation, which allows for spillovers and imperfect rivalry in consumption of the publicly provided good. We identify three sources of welfare loss from decentralization: imperfect redistribution, interjurisdictional free-riding, and inefficient residential choice. Whereas the welfare loss from imperfect redistribution decreases and that from free-riding rises unambiguously as the publicly provided good becomes more pure, the welfare loss from the inefficient residential choice depends non-monotonically on spillovers and rivalry. The equilibrium can be characterized by relative crowding of either the rich or the poor municipality. Our results imply that the characteristics of the publicly provided good are an important determinant for the welfare costs of decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, we examine the impact of air pollution on the job location choice of a highly educated labor force. Using the administrative job contract records of all graduates from Tsinghua University from 2005 to 2016, we find that air pollution significantly reduces the probability of elite graduates accepting job offers in a polluted city. Specifically, all else equal, if a city's PM2.5 level increases by 10 μg/m3, the share of Tsinghua graduates choosing that city will decrease by 0.23 percentage point (9% of the mean value). This "crowding-out" effect is larger for master's and doctoral graduates, but insignificant for undergraduates. A placebo test finds this effect does not exist for individuals who had signed a job contract prior to university admission, which strengthens our finding. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that males, students who grew up in cleaner provinces, and students graduating from school of the environment are more sensitive to air pollution. Different levels of preference for clean air and tolerance to pollution, as well as whether having the knowledge of pollution's harms, can effectively explain the heterogeneous effect of air pollution's impacts on job location choices of those elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bonus pay policy for teachers in the U.S. is analyzed in this paper. We quantitatively argue that, because of the decentralized education finance system in the U.S., this policy may lead to higher teacher and household sorting across school districts. This then may lead to higher variance of achievement and lower mean achievement. Formally, we use an equilibrium political economy model of education at which households, heterogeneous in exogenously set income, and teachers, heterogeneous in exogenously set quality, are endogenously allocated across two school districts. Public education expenditures, which includes teachers' wage payment and non-teacher related education spending, are financed through local income taxation. Income tax rate in each district is determined via majority voting. Achievement depends on the efforts chosen by teachers and non-teacher related education spending. Teacher efficiency wage per unit of quality is determined at the national teacher labor market. We first calibrate our benchmark model by matching certain statistics from the U.S. data. Then in a computational experiment, we introduce bonus pay for teachers which rises with average achievement. We find that for the recently observed level of average bonus pay (6.59 % of average base salary), variance of achievement is 2.46 % higher and mean achievement is 1.79 % lower than the benchmark. Variance of achievement reaches its peak when average bonus pay is 14.06 % and then it starts falling. Also, mean achievement always falls as average bonus pay rises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Characteristics of the urban environment influence where and when crime events occur; however, past studies often analyse cross-sectional data for one spatial scale and do not account for the processes and place-based policies that influence crime across multiple scales. This research applies a Bayesian cross-classified multilevel modelling approach to examine the spatiotemporal patterning of violent crime at the small-area, neighbourhood, electoral ward, and police patrol zone scales. Violent crime is measured at the small-area scale (lower-level units) and small areas are nested in neighbourhoods, electoral wards, and patrol zones (higher-level units). The cross-classified multilevel model accommodates multiple higher-level units that are non-hierarchical and have overlapping geographical boundaries. Results show that violent crime is positively associated with population size, residential instability, the central business district, and commercial, government-institutional, and recreational land uses within small areas and negatively associated with civic engagement within electoral wards. Combined, the three higher-level units explain approximately fifteen per cent of the total spatiotemporal variation of violent crime. Neighbourhoods are the most important source of variation among the higher-level units. This study advances understanding of the multiscale processes influencing spatiotemporal crime patterns and provides area-specific information within the geographical frameworks used by policymakers in urban planning, local government, and law enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to analyse female participation in National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) across the blocks in Bankura and Birbhum districts. Tabular analysis has been used to show how the scheme influences the livelihood of the rural women. Logit regression model has been used to analyse the factors determining the participation decision of rural women in NREGS. Across the surveyed districts in West Bengal, there exist wide variations in the level of women's participation. It is found that women from Bankura District have higher levels of participation compared to those in Birbhum District. The empirical analysis used to identify the determinants of the women's participation reveals that income from other sources, family size, education level of the women and religion are significantly associated with the participation decision of the women folk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using unique matched employer-employee data from China, we discover that migrant workers in the manufacturing industry who are proficient in the local dialect earn lower wages than those who are not. We also find that workers with better dialect skills are more likely to settle for lower wages in exchange for social insurance. We hypothesize that they are doing so in the hope of obtaining permanent residency and household registration status (Hukou) in the host city where they work. Further tests show that the phenomenon of "exchanging wages for social insurance participation" is more pronounced among workers employed in smaller enterprises. Moreover, migrant workers with better language skills have a stronger desire to stay in the host city. Our conclusions are robust to different specifications, even after addressing the endogeneity issue for language acquisition. The present study provides a new perspective on the impact of language fluency on social integration among migrants, one of the most disadvantaged groups in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies have consistently documented that while married men tend to lead more prosperous careers after moving, migration tends to be disruptive for careers of married women. We extend this literature by exploring whether migration is followed by a change in subjective wellbeing (SWB). We examine how this experience differs by individuals of different gender, relationship-status and motivations for moving (of both partners in a couple relationship, where relevant). The results are compared to wage differences following migration. All results are conditioned on time-varying personal characteristics, including important life events. Consistent with prior literature, males have a stronger tendency than females to increase their earnings after moving. However, we find that females have a stronger tendency than males to increase their SWB following a move. These gender differences are pronounced for couples. Differences tend to narrow, but do not disappear, once we account for motivations for moving of individuals and, where relevant, of their partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional cohesion and competition for students has fostered interest in the decision-making process behind the selection of higher education institution. We use a gravity model approach to estimate the impact of socio-economic profile of districts and characteristics of higher education institutions on the migratory flows of candidates to undergraduate programmes in Portugal. Elasticity to distance is found to be negative, in line with the literature. The characteristics of the district of destination are unimportant, contrasting with the characteristics of institutions: a measure of propensity to unemployment among graduates is associated with smaller incoming flows, the number of vacancies is associated with a more than proportional positive impact on flows, and universities are shown to attract more students than polytechnics. Regarding the district of origin, the greater the local supply of higher education, the lower the outgoing flows, and the larger the young population, the higher the outgoing flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ageing population resulting from the one-child policy and massive flows of internal migration in China pose major challenges to elderly care in rural areas where elderly support is based on a traditional inter-generational family support mechanism. We use data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to examine how migration of an adult child affects the emotional health of elderly parents left-behind. We identify the effects using fixed effects and IV approaches which rely on different sources of variation. We find that migration reduces happiness by 6.6 percentage points and leads to a 3.3 percentage points higher probability of loneliness. CES-D scores of elderly parents are severely increased pushing average scores close to the cut-off indicating clinical levels of depressive symptoms. As emotional health is a key determinant of the overall health status, our findings have significant impacts on economic development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a national ballot in 2009, Swiss citizens surprisingly approved an amendment to the Swiss constitution to ban the further construction of minarets. The ballot outcome manifested reservations and anti-immigrant attitudes in regions of Switzerland which had previously been hidden. We exploit this fact as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of negative attitudes towards immigrants on foreigners' location choices and thus indirectly on their utility. Based on a regression discontinuity design with unknown discontinuity points and administrative data on the population of foreigners, we find that the probability of their moving to a municipality which unexpectedly expressed stronger reservations decreases initially by about 40%. The effect is accompanied by a drop of housing prices in these municipalities and levels off over a period of about 5 months. Moreover, foreigners in high-skill occupations react relatively more strongly highlighting a tension when countries try to attract well-educated professionals from abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration is one response to climatic stress and shocks. In this article we review the recent literature across various disciplines on the effects of climate change on migration. We explore key features of the relationship between climate change and migration, distinguishing between fast-onset and slow-onset climatic events and examining the causes of heterogeneity in migratory responses to climate events. We also seek to shed light on the interactions between different types of adaptations to climate events as well as the mechanisms underlying the relationship between climate change and migration. Based on our review of the existing literature, we identify gaps in the literature and present some general policy recommendations and priorities for research on climate-induced migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyse the link between homeownership and various aggregate and individual labour market outcomes. Our aim is to investigate the likely consequences of public policies that promote homeownership. To this end, we develop a circular firm-worker matching model with Nash-bargained wage setting and free market entry. Homeowners are assumed to be less mobile than tenants and to bear higher mobility costs. Our numerical exercises show that tenants usually have lower unemployment rates and lower wage rates than homeowners. Importantly, workers' performances do not necessarily improve following an increase in the proportion of homeowners. The latter crucially depends on the relative utility enjoyed by homeowners and tenants when unemployed. In the aggregate, nevertheless, we find that the unemployment rate generally increases following an increase in the proportion of homeowners. Yet, the link between the two can be reversed if the homeowners' utility is lower than that of tenants when unemployed. Our model thus identifies a number of conditions under which Oswald's conjecture is likely to hold or not. Thus, our results do not necessarily support the view that policies fostering homeownership are adequate public policies given their potentially negative effect on the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard labor market models predict that the likelihood of employment increases, hours worked increase, and individuals transition from less-skilled and temporary jobs to more skilled and more stable employment as they age. I examine the association between age and transactional sex work using national household surveys from Zambia, one of the few settings with general population surveys asking women about transactional sex and a relatively high documented prevalence of employment in transactional sex. My results indicate that the likelihood of employment in transactional sex sharply falls with age. Increased employment opportunities outside of transactional sex do not appear to explain the transactional sex employment-age profile and marital status appears to explain only a portion of it. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that clients prefer younger transactional sex workers and suggest that policymakers implement interventions designed to reduce client demand for younger females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent an individual is successful in a variety of outcomes is the result of multiple factors such as (but not limited to) parental background, level of education, discrimination and business cycles. Factors like these also indicate that the success in life can be attributable to factors that both take individual-level merits into account but also to structural factors such as discrimination and contextual effects. Over the last decades, a growing interest in decomposing and categorising factors that affect the life chances of individuals has led to the formation of inequality of opportunity as a research field. This paper builds upon this growing literature, which amounts to quantify the contribution of factors that lie beyond the control of individuals to the total inequality observed in different spheres of life. Using rich Swedish longitudinal register data, we are able to follow individuals over time and their educational attainment during upbringing and later labour market outcomes. In difference from other inequality of opportunity studies, we make use of an egocentric neighbourhood approach to integrate the socio-economic composition of the parental neighbourhood in an inequality model and illustrate its contribution to the total inequality in both outcomes quantitatively. Using multilevel regression analyses, we show that the parental neighbourhood is highly influential in educational attainment and remains so for market outcomes even years after exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is an essential input to the entrepreneurial process. Information based on the trials of past entrepreneurial projects can be particularly useful as it reveals details about the local market, benefiting subsequent ventures. Through a formal model of entrepreneurial search characterized by information flows and networks, we hypothesize a diminishing returns relationship between entrepreneurial information, in the form of births and deaths of entrepreneurial projects and economic benefits in the form of employment growth. We leverage the natural experiment contexts of regional economies to explore the role of information as it varies across market scale. In addition, given that networks, an important channel for information, are most powerful and effective in localized settings, we use the regional socio-demographic variation to explore the role of networks defined by gender. We indeed find statistically and economically significant evidence for the information-growth relationship in terms of both market scale and gender, with larger positive employment effects in less dynamic markets and less-networked market contexts. After building the empirical case for the importance of information flows and networks, we conclude with policy implications with particular attention to broadening and deepening entrepreneurial ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers an open rural region of a developed country with two sectors, an environmentally sensitive agricultural industry and locally operated tourism that generates pollution. We find that if the representative resident's preference for environmentally friendly tourism services is low, the introduction of additional capital, labor, and tourists promoted by the local government may harm native inhabitants' economic welfare. Even if tourism is environmentally friendly, the inflow of capital or labor may still have negative effects. On the contrary, if each resident's preference for tourism service is high, an increased flow of tourists from outside may have positive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural‐urban migration is an integral part of the structural transformation as societies move from a traditional agricultural economy to a modern economy. This process has many potential consequences for migrants. Our study focuses on the lifetime health effects of the large mid‐20th century migration out of rural U.S. Northern Great Plains states, primarily to urban locations in the West and Midwest. An analysis of marginal treatment effects (MTEs) shows that (a) migrants are positively selected, and (b) the causal impact of migration is decreased longevity. Our evidence suggests that elevated mortality among migrants is linked to increased smoking and alcohol consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until recently, Cyprus and Malta's economies are mainly driven by tourism. Also, the two countries are consistently referred to as the frontline states based on the age-long refugee crisis caused by African migrants during the Middle East civil unrest. On this regard, the Grouped mean approaches of the Fully-modified least square (FMOLS) and Dynamic least square (DOLS) estimators are employed to investigate the long-run relationship between the housing prices and international tourist arrivals, and the number of refugees. Using the quarterly data spanning 2005Q1 to 2016Q4, the study finds an elasticity of at most 0.37 and 0.78 of the house price with respect to the number of refugees and international tourist arrival, respectively. It further implies that the housing price and the number of refugees ("refugeeism") are positively related; tourism was observed to be negatively related to the housing price. Also, there exists a significant Granger causality from the number of refugees to the house price without feedback but no evidence of Granger causality is found between tourism and the house price. The study proffers policies that effectively avert disservice and minimize challenges associated with growth in tourism activities and refugee crisis associated with the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we demonstrate that the conventional ordinary least squares and fixed effects estimators of classical gravity models of migration are biased, and that the interpretation of coefficients in the fixed effects gravity model is typically incorrect. We then present a best linear unbiased (BLU) estimator for gravity models of migration, and illustrate its application with inter-regional data from New Zealand. The results demonstrate that the standard ordinary least squares and fixed effect models lead to biased coefficients on population. Alternative estimates that are BLU are provided for a data generating process with fixed origin and destination effects. The coefficients on population must be interpreted in this model as growth rate effects rather than level effects. Our findings also have significance for other types of spatial interaction modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is experiencing rapid urbanization during which millions of migrants move from rural to urban areas. Recently, China initiated the national strategy of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation" to tap into the innovative potential and promote entrepreneurial development among the general public, with rural migrants being one of the targeted groups of this policy. This context calls for a better understanding of rural migrants' entrepreneurial formation and transition. Using the 2012 and 2014 Chinese Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) data, we test the importance of human capital, social capital, and community trust on migrants' entrepreneurial entry with cross-sectional and panel data analyses. We find that rural migrants' entrepreneurship rates and entrepreneurial entry rates surpass both their urban resident and rural resident counterparts, indicating the active role they play in urban business landscape. While individual characteristics and social networks play similar roles in these three groups' entrepreneurial transition, rural migrants' business activities are particularly shaped by their perception of communities. Further analysis of migrant-owned businesses reveals their over-representation in main-street industries but their firm performances are on par with other businesses, suggesting their positive economic contribution in cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the joint dynamics between house prices, population aging and unemployment in South Africa. It uses provincial-level data set to compare the demographic effects of house prices across different housing segments over the period from 1995 to 2015. When heterogeneity, endogeneity and spatial effects are controlled for, the analysis finds that on average in the past 22 years, population aging has contributed to the decline of the South African house prices by 6.28 and 7.52 basis point in the large and medium housing segments, respectively, while the small segment has remained unaffected. Likewise, unemployment appears to have played a significant role in slowing down the growth rate of house prices across segments but to a lesser extent. While the response of real house prices to demographic shift is consistent with the life cycle hypothesis, the insensitivity of small house prices to aging might reveal the mitigating effect of the retirees' relocation from larger segment houses to smaller ones. The relocation effect might induce higher demand of small segment houses which drives up their prices and offsets the detrimental effect of aging. These findings suggest that increasing the incentive to prolong the retirement age or engage elderly population in other income-generating activities to meet their increasing financial needs given the meagre social security system is likely to sustain the growth prospective of housing value in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse the correlation of various measures of social capital with the willingness to migrate in 28 post-communist and five western European comparison countries using the Life in Transition Survey. Memberships in clubs and civil society organisations are substantially lower in post-communist countries that in the Western European countries this is mainly due to the cohorts socialised prior to political reforms in the 1990's. Differences in endowments with this measure of social capital explain around 2.5 percentage points of the 9-11 percentage point difference in the willingness to migrate between the post-communist and comparison countries. Differences in contacts to friends and family, by contrast, contribute only little to explaining these differences. Furthermore, despite clear cohort effects in endowments with social capital between cohorts socialized during and after communist rule, there is no clear evidence of such cohort effects in the impact of social capital on the willingness to migrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain the seeming unresponsiveness of labor to react to economic disparities in terms of migration. In theory, the potential of workers to implicitly alleviate regional disparities in, for example, unemployment or wage levels by relocating appears potent, but finds little support empirically. To resolve this perplexity, a dynamic discrete choice model is used, which translates into a two stage estimation strategy for recovering structural parameters. Investigating Austrian bilateral movements on the NUTS 3 level from 2002 to 2014, the results suggest that this unresponsiveness builds on two pillars. First, estimated average migration costs are in the range of six times the average annual wage, which appears sizable enough to prevent taking advantage of economic opportunities for workers. These costs are shown to have decreased over time, though. Second, the relatively high variation in the random utility shifter can be interpreted as relative unimportance of regional disparities in forming migration decisions. Finally, a spatial approach on estimated regional valuations reveals an apparent 'beauty contest' of regions, where regions' own valuations suffer from proximity to highly attractive ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question concerning the price of geographic mobility in various labour market and migration scenarios. Pivotal points are expected mobility premiums which are sufficient to tip the scales in favour of moving to a geographically distinct location. These premiums are first derived within a theoretical model, accounting not only for location-specific amenity levels or labour market conditions, but also for heterogeneous personality traits and preferences. Derived hypotheses demonstrate that—in presence of heterogeneous psychic costs or adjustment capabilities—expected mobility premiums can remain distinctly positive even in an unemployment scenario. Furthermore, adjustment capabilities are to a large extent related to earlier mobility experiences, implying that labour mobility is partially learnable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimate the long-run causal effect of information technology, i.e., Internet and powerful computers, as measured by the adoption of teleworking, on average commuting distance within professions in the Netherlands. We employ data for 2 years—1996 when information technology was hardly adopted and 2010 when information technology was widely used in a wide range of professions. Variation in information technology adoption over time and between professions allows us to infer the causal effect of interest using difference-in-differences techniques combined with propensity score matching. Our results show that the long-run causal effect of information technology on commuting distance is too small to be identified and likely to be absent. This suggests that, contrary to some assertions, the advent of information technology did not have a profound impact on the spatial structure of the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the location choice of cultural producers when cities differ in housing supply and income demographics. We develop a two-region spatial model containing three types of industries: a constant returns to scale traditional sector, a modern sector with external scale economies and a monopolistically competitive cultural sector. The model is initially analyzed when workers supply labor inelastically to their respective industry. Both integration and segregation are never a stable equilibrium, and the conditions for the stability of both concentrated and partially interior equilibrium are solved for. The model is extended to allow for cultural producers to divide their time between cultural production and moonlighting in the traditional sector, in order to smooth their income. Under this extension, there is an equilibrium where a share of cultural producers live isolated from a larger integrated market. We also identify an equilibrium where one region is able to sustain full-time cultural producers, while in the opposite region cultural producers must moonlight in the traditional sector. Under partially interior equilibria, the number of varieties of the cultural good is always larger in the region with the greater supply of housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005, the Korean government has relocated national research institutes from the Seoul Metropolitan Area (SMA) to other parts of the nation. The main purpose of this relocation is to ameliorate disparities in population and economic power across regions. However, it turns out that only 27% of researchers in the SMA have actually relocated. This implies that researcher's preference for a living environment should be reflected in the planning process. Hence, this paper attempts to specify the migration behaviors of researchers by comparing their preferences with those of general workers. Here, regional living environment is represented by a function of two attributes: regional labor market conditions and living environments. The paper shows that regional living environments have a more decisive impact on the migration of researchers, relative to general workers. Also, researchers are found to be slightly more sensitive to regional living environments especially crime than regional labor market conditions. Finally, the paper suggests a policy direction for balanced development among regions in Korea based on the results obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the long-run spatial distribution of industry using a multi-region core-periphery model with quasi-linear log utility Pflüger (Reg Sci Urban Econ 34:565-573, 2004). We show that a distribution in which industry is evenly dispersed among some of the regions, while the other regions have no industry, cannot be stable. A spatial distribution where industry is evenly distributed among all regions except one can be stable, but only if that region is significantly more industrialized than the other regions. When trade costs decrease, the type of transition from dispersion to agglomeration depends on the fraction of workers that are mobile. If this fraction is low, the transition from dispersion to agglomeration is catastrophic once dispersion becomes unstable. If it is high, there is a discontinuous jump to partial agglomeration in one region and then a smooth transition until full agglomeration. Finally, we find that mobile workers benefit from more agglomerated spatial distributions, whereas immobile workers prefer more dispersed distributions. The economy as a whole shows a tendency towards overagglomeration for intermediate levels of trade costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined factors that influence the tenure choices of households in different counties and cities of Taiwan. Data collected in the Housing Status Survey by the Construction and Planning Agency of the Ministry of the Interior were analyzed using hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM). The study designated the household sector as a unit at level 1 and counties and cities as a unit at level 2, with the difference among the counties and cities accounting for 9% of the total variation in rental and purchase decisions. Based on the empirical results, tenure choice was positively and significantly affected by such level-1 factors as gender, age, educational level, area per capita, number of rooms per capita, private loans, and permanent income. The level-2 attribute variable, the housing price to income ratio, had a significant negative effect on tenure choice; a higher ratio of housing price to income resulted in a higher preference among households toward leasing in their lease-or-buy decisions. With regard to the forecast ability comparison, the hit rate of HGLM (90.10%) was higher than that of the binary logistic regression model (87.26%). In terms of the forecasting accuracy evaluated using four measures of association, HGLM outperformed the traditional binary logistic regression model. Based on tenfold cross-validation, HGLM also showed a better hit rate than the traditional binary logistic regression model, meaning that the evaluation results had both robustness and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads on Real Estate Investment Trust (REITs) have been extremely volatile since the onset of 2008 financial crisis. To have a better understanding of it, we examine the CDS spreads on REITs for both pre- and post-crisis with a particular focus on the effects of geographic concentration and local economic conditions on CDS spreads on REITs. We document that, above and beyond the factors of commonality suggested in the literature, a REIT’s geographic concentration has strong explanatory power for the behaviors of CDS spreads on REITs and the magnitude of this impact depends on the state of the local economy. Our findings suggest there is a potential local-to-private risk transfer through which market participants incorporate their expectations about the future economic health of the region into asset prices. This channel leads to significant co-movement between CDS spreads on REITs and the performance of local economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We leverage a granular representation of mobility patterns before and during the first wave of SARS-COV2 in Italy to investigate the economic consequences of various forms of lockdown policies when accounting for mobility restrictions between and within local jurisdictions, i.e. municipalities, provinces and regions. We provide an analytical characterization of the rate of economic losses using a network-based spectral method. The latter treats the spread of contagion of economic losses due to commuting restrictions as a dynamical system stability problem. Our results indicate that the interplay between lower level of smartworking and the polarization of commuting flows to fewer local labor hubs in the South of Italy makes Southern territories extremely important in spreading economic losses. We estimate an economic contraction of total income derived from commuting restrictions in the range of 10–30% depending on the economic assumptions. However, alternative policies proposed during the second wave of SARS-COV2 can pose a greater risk to Northern areas due to their higher degree of mobility between jurisdictions than Southern ones. The direction of economic losses tend to propagate from large to medium-small jurisdictions across all alternative lockdown policies we tested. Our study shows how complex mobility patterns can have unequal consequences to economic losses across the country and call for more tailored implementation of restrictions to balance the containment of contagion with the need to sustain economic output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]