Journal of Economic Geography - Advance Access

Green economics: an introduction to theory, policy and practice: Molly Scott Cato

Dorling, D. — 2009-07-03

Using design for upgrading in the fashion industry

Aspers, P. — 2009-07-02

The purpose of the article is to analyze upgrading by looking at the design of fashion garments. To that end, I use the theoretical concept of contextual knowledge to understand the problems faced by firms, and their staff, that want to upgrade through design. Contextual knowledge combines a general knowledge of fashion with the lifeworld that actors use for interpretation of fashion. Lifeworld is a notion which refers to what is taken for granted. Producers and consumers in the global fashion industry live in different lifeworlds. The text discusses upgrading strategies of garment manufacturers, drawing on unique empirical material. It provides a theoretical tool for analyzing culturally primed production in a global setting.

Grounding globalization: labour in the age of insecurity: Webster, E., Lambert, R. and Bezuidenhout, A.

Lier, D. — 2009-06-29

Are Worker Rights Human Rights?: Richard McIntyre Ann Arbor

Ruwanpura, K. N — 2009-06-29

Global finance and the development of regional clusters: tracing paths in Munich's film and TV industry

Zademach, H.-M. — 2009-06-11

Recent work in economic geography has provided notable insights into the regional implications of finance-driven capitalism. In particular, it has been argued that the pressures created by the prioritisation of shareholder value and the rise of new financial agents, such as private equity and hedge funds, are disembedding regional social relations, and empirical evidence illustrates the devastating effects that the short-term profit orientation of these agents can have on local economic development. The relationship between a local economy's integration into the global capitalist system and its development performance is, however, more ambiguous than might be expected. This article explores this connection in greater detail within the context of a regional cluster, namely the film and TV industry cluster in Munich—one of the leading centres for this type of industry in Germany—by means of addressing the adjustments related to the entry of foreign investors after the insolvency of the Kirch Group in 2002. Initially, the research adds weight to the suspicion that financial agents erode the long-term wealth- and employment-generating capacities of national corporations. In addition, however, the results also reveal the dynamic restructuring processes triggered by these players which, at least in the specific case investigated, provided an acknowledged corrective and contributed to the cluster's recent resurgence.

'CITY OF LONDON, CITY OF LEARNING'? Placing business education within the geographies of finance

Hall, S., Appleyard, L. — 2009-06-11

The role of highly skilled financiers in shaping the spatialities of financial systems has been widely studied by social scientists. However, comparatively less attention has been paid to the growing use of business education to (re)produce 'highly skilled' financiers throughout the career life-course. In response, in this article, we adopt a cultural economy approach to report on the use of business education by investment banks operating in London's; financial district. Whilst business education in general and MBA degrees in particular are often claimed to facilitate globally mobile economic elites, we argue that the assembling of financial expertise through business education also serves to territorially and societally embed financiers into particular regulatory regimes and organizational cultures. As a result, we suggest that business education represents an important, yet hitherto neglected, set of activities in understanding the continued geographical and organizational heterogeneity of elite financial labour markets. In so doing, we argue that a focus on financial business education demonstrates the value of cultural economy approaches to financial geography and research into the variegated nature of finance capitalism more generally.

Stock exchange virtualisation and the decline of second-tier financial centres--the cases of Amsterdam and Frankfurt

Engelen, E., Grote, M. H. — 2009-06-10

International financial centres used to be stable economic clusters held together by the centripetal forces emanating from physical exchanges. However, given near complete ‘virtualisation’, these ‘anchors’ have gradually disappeared. As this article demonstrates, this has had telling consequences for second-tier financial centres like Amsterdam and Frankfurt. Empirically, the article adds cases of financial centre decline to the existing collection of case descriptions. Theoretically, the article assesses the explanatory capacity of the combination of two complementary theoretical perspectives, New Economic Geography and Comparative Political Economy, by determining to what extent they fit the two case studies.

Financialization takes off at Boeing

Muellerleile, C. M. — 2009-06-09

This article examines the 2001 dislocation of the headquarters of the iconic US aerospace company, Boeing, out of the Puget Sound region of the State of Washington, its ancestral manufacturing base. It argues the rationale for the exit was the desire on the part of Boeing's increasingly finance-focused executives to detach and disembed the ‘brains’ of the company from the product-focused, engineering-based corporate culture embedded in Puget Sound. The article attempts to ground the logic of financialization by examining how it emerged at, and was shaped by one particular company. I employ economic geographers’ conceptions of place-based corporate culture, and societal, territorial and network embeddedness (Hess, 2004, Progress in Human Geography, 28: 165–186) to explain how financialization and corporate dislocation can enable each other. The article also briefly discusses Boeing's eventual decision to re-embed its headquarters in downtown Chicago, Illinois.

Internal migration and the earnings of married couples in the United States

Blackburn, M. L. — 2009-05-13

Economic models of migration recognize that potential changes in income are an important factor in the decision to change geographic location within a country's borders. For married couples, gains need not occur for both spouses, and ‘tied movers’ may on average see their relative earnings fall as a result of internal migration. Previous research suggesting that wives appear on average to be tied movers primarily dates back to the 1970s. Examining data from the 1990s, I find a result similar to this earlier research, with wives losing on average about 20% of their pre-migration earnings. Much of this decline is associated with a decline in work hours for wives. The effect seems to be short-lived, not clearly persisting into the second year following migration.

The effect of neighbourhood housing tenure mix on labour market outcomes: a longitudinal investigation of neighbourhood effects

van Ham, M., Manley, D. — 2009-05-08

This article investigates the effect of different levels of neighbourhood housing tenure mix and deprivation on transitions from unemployment to employment and the probability of staying in employment for those with a job. We used multiple regression models and unique individual level data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study. We found that high correlations between the percentage of social renting in a neighbourhood and labour market outcomes disappeared when controlling for neighbourhood deprivation, individual level education and tenure. The results show that living in a deprived neighbourhood is negatively correlated with labour market performance, but predominantly for homeowners and not for social renters. We suggest that selection effects and not causation are behind the neighbourhood effects found.

The power of finance: accounting harmonization's effect on pension provision

Dixon, A. D., Monk, A. H. B. — 2009-05-04

Occupational defined benefit (DB) pensions today are outmoded and increasingly costly corporate burdens and are now in decline. However, the transformation of DB is found to be contingent on the institutional setting in which transformation occurs. In this article we offer a modest conceptualization of the interplay between global pressures for change and convergence, particularly accounting harmonization, and the local institutional environment and geography that filter these forces in the context of DB pensions. We demonstrate this behavior through analyses of DB transformation and decline in the UK and the Netherlands.

Have developed countries escaped the curse of distance?

Boulhol, H., de Serres, A. — 2009-04-27

This article applies for the first time the framework developed by Redding and Venables (2004, Journal of International Economics, 62: 53–82) on a panel dataset restricted to advanced countries over 1970–2004, and shows that the cost of remoteness remains significant. Second, the article highlights that the elasticity of aggregate income to distance to markets in the Redding–Venables model is severely biased upwards in cross-section samples that mix both developing and developed countries, most likely due to the inability to adequately control for heterogeneity in technology levels across countries. Also, the effect of distance is robust to whether the trade equation is specified as linear in logarithm or nonlinear in level.

International trade and wage inequality in Canada

Breau, S., Rigby, D. L. — 2009-04-22

We investigate the impact of international trade on wages and on wage inequality across industries and regions in Canada. An employer–employee dataset is developed combining individual worker characteristics from the 20% sample of the 2001 Census of Population and synthetic establishments from the 1999 Annual Survey of Manufactures. Results from wage regression models show that import competition from low-income countries has a significant impact on wage inequality in Canada, pushing down the wages of less-educated workers relative to those of highly educated workers. The negative effect of import competition on the wages of less-skilled workers is shown to be more pronounced in Québec and in the Prairie provinces, as well as in labor-intensive and product-differentiated industries.

Knowledge spillovers, black holes and the equilibrium location of vertically linked industries

Barde, S. — 2009-04-17

Using a generalized version of the Venables (1996, International Economic Review, 37: 341–359) model, this article explores the relative locations of two vertically linked sectors with knowledge spillovers. Analytical investigation shows that the dynamic properties of the Venables model are significantly affected by the presence of spillovers. In particular, the own-cost reduction effects at low transport costs can be so strong that runaway agglomeration dynamics appear in a manner consistent with the black hole concept found in the literature. However, due to the decay of information over space, these black hole dynamics are endogenous to the model and disappear when transport costs are high enough. Importantly, the location predictions obtained in simulations of the model are consistent with the empirical finding that industrials sector that benefit from spillovers are typically more agglomerated than sector that do not benefit from such spillovers.

Do developing countries need 'good' institutions and policies and deep financial markets to benefit from capital account liberalization?

van Hulten, A., Webber, M. — 2009-04-02

This article critically evaluates the argument that, if developing countries had better institutions and policies and deeper financial markets, they would receive a boost to growth from capital account liberalization. The existing empirical record is ambiguous and leaves unanswered many of the important questions facing policy-makers. To test some predictions driving the case for capital account liberalization in developing countries, this article investigates the relationship between net capital inflows and medium-term economic growth within a sample of rich, institutionally advanced economies between 1984 and 2004. No evidence of a strong or statistically robust relationship between net capital inflows and future economic growth is found. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that net capital inflows are more strongly associated with past economic growth than with future economic growth. This result implies that capital account liberalization is not likely to boost growth, even among countries with the most appropriate institutions and policies.

Community, economic creativity and organization * Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts (Eds)

Coe, N. M. — 2009-03-26

Location equilibrium with endogenous rent seeking

Wiberg, M. — 2009-03-16

This article analyzes the location of manufacturing activities when regional policy is determined by endogenous rent seeking. Once lobbying for government transfers to regions is included in an economic geography framework with size asymmetries, the standard prediction that the larger region becomes the core when trade barriers are reduced no longer holds. The establishment of manufacturing production in the economically smaller region is increasing in the level of regional integration once trade becomes freer than a certain threshold value. When free trade prevails, the relocation of industry takes place up to the point where there are as many firms operating in the South as in the North. Furthermore, lobbying slows down the agglomeration process, whereas the home market magnification effect [Krugman (1991, Journal of Political Economy, 99, 483–499)] becomes weaker.

Localization economies and establishment size: was Marshall right after all?

Figueiredo, O., Guimaraes, P., Woodward, D. — 2009-03-10

This article re-examines the relationship between industry localization and the employment size of establishments. To measure localization, we use an approach that builds on Ellison and Glaeser's (1997, Journal of Political Economy, 105: 889–927) dartboard location model. Our localization index is based on plant (establishment) counts and more closely reflects the firm externalities of Marshallian industrial districts, in contrast with broader measures of localization that include an establishment's internal economies, such as Holmes and Steven's (2002, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 84: 682–690) analysis based on employment location quotients. In line with Alfred Marshall's theory of external economies in industrial districts, we find evidence that plants located in areas where an industry exhibits localization, or excess concentration, are smaller than plants in the same industry outside such areas.

Reconceptualizing urban governance through a new paradigm for urban infrastructure networks

Torrance, M. — 2009-03-03

This article focuses on the rapidly changing ownership and governance of urban infrastructure networks. While institutional investors are expending capital and time purchasing infrastructure assets in cities around the world, the changes in the management of urban infrastructure networks are under researched. Both the reasons for the transformations of and the impacts on urban infrastructure assets, such as roads, airports and water utilities around the world, are discussed and reconceptualized through emerging supranational glocal governance and financialization frameworks.

The increasing importance of quality of life

Rappaport, J. — 2009-03-01

The US population has been migrating to places with high perceived quality of life. Theoretically, such migration can follow from the increasing demand for amenities that accompanies increasing wealth. Under the baseline calibration of a general equilibrium model, a place with amenities for which individuals would initially pay 5% of their income grows slightly faster than an otherwise identical place. As local quality of life becomes more important in determining relative population density, local productivity independently becomes less important. Together these two trends cause local amenities to eventually become the sole determinant of relative local density. From a quantitative perspective, high quality of life together with low relative productivity can boost metropolitan population growth by several percentage points.

The developing carbon financial service industry: expertise, adaptation and complementarity in London and New York

Knox-Hayes, J. — 2009-02-17

This article looks at the role of market complementarities in developing new carbon markets. I argue that markets are composed of social as well as economic networks. The reliance of these networks on social connectivity and proximity makes the development of new markets particularly suited to established financial centers like London and New York and reinforces the importance of these centers. London and New York provide not only resources and financial infrastructure, but also institutional proximity that develops routines and practices between complementary firms. I investigate three levels of complementarity between (existent and new) markets and within the new carbon markets: the complementarity of expertise and information, the complementarity of institutions and services and the complementarity of market systems. Case studies constructed from expert interviews in London and New York are used to support the argument. This article concludes by commenting on the dialectic nature of financial agglomeration and market embeddedness.

Does public housing occupancy increase unemployment?

Dujardin, C., Goffette-Nagot, F. — 2009-02-11

This article shows that living in public housing has no effect on the probability of being unemployed in France, once we account for the endogeneity of public housing. We estimate a simultaneous probit model of unemployment and public housing. On a first sample for Lyon, we instrument public housing with the gender composition of children. On a second national sample, the instrument is the city-level share of public housing. Both samples yield the same conclusion, which we justify by showing that a small amount of selection on unobservables is enough to eliminate the positive effect found in ‘naive’ estimates.

International retailing * Nicholas Alexander and Anne Marie Doherty

Palmer, M. — 2008-12-19

International Business Geography: Case Studies of Corporate Firms * Edited by Piet Pellenbarg and Egbert Wever

Crone, M. — 2008-08-27