The Annals of Regional Science

In this paper, we study the relationship between informal employment and city structure, in the presence of informal housing. We build an urban search-matching model incorporating informal labor, informal housing, and rural–urban migration. We find that a greater decentralization of informal jobs leads to a higher informality rate in the labor market. This, in turn, pushes the expected income in the city downward and reduces incentives for rural workers to migrate. Surprisingly, rural–urban migration increases. This happens because greater decentralization relaxes the competition for land throughout the city, which reduces urban costs for all urban residents and effectively increases the expected income in the city.

This paper investigates the influence of Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail (HSR) on regional economy and its spatial spillover effect along this line. Several forms of spatial difference-in-difference (SDID) models are used to analyze the night light data and other socio-economic data from 47 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2013. The results show that Beijing–Shanghai HSR significantly promoted economic growth of HSR cities compared with adjacent non-HSR cities. At the same time, the impacts of Beijing–Shanghai HSR on HSR cities propagate to other adjacent cities, promoting the economic growth of these cities. The opening of Beijing–Shanghai HSR also increased spatial spillover effect on the overall region along the line.

This paper investigates the geographic distribution of talent and its associations with innovation, entrepreneurship and regional economic performance in China. Two types of talent are examined: human capital in terms of the educational attainment and the creative class in terms of the occupational skill. Explanatory variables of the talent distribution cover both market factors (jobs and wage levels) and non-market factors (amenities, openness and the university). The results of correlation analysis and multivariate analysis show that the university is the single most important factor that affects the talent distribution in China. Wage levels, service amenities and openness also contribute to talent attraction but to different extents. Furthermore, human capital outweighing the creative class exhibits positive effects on innovation, entrepreneurship and regional economic performance. Openness presents a direct influence not only on talent stock, but on innovation and regional economic performance as well. Explanations of empirical results in the Chinese context are offered.

A residential location model derived from urban economics is combined with the geometry of a multifractal Sierpinski carpet to represent and model a metropolitan area. This area is made up of a system of built-up patches hierarchically organised around a city centre, and green areas arranged in an inverse hierarchical order (large open-spaces in the periphery). An analytical solution is obtained using a specific geographic coding system for computing distances. The values of the parameters used in the model are based on the French medium sized metropolitan areas; a realistic benchmark is proposed and comparative-statics simulations are performed. The results show that the French peri-urbanisation process (which took place from 1970 onward) can be explained by an increase in income and a reduction in transport costs. Nevertheless, changes in household preferences, in particular an increased taste for open spaces, can also contribute to urban sprawl by making the gradient of land rents less steep and by making peripheral household locations more desirable.

The decreasing costs of telecommunications and the often increasing costs of transportation have given rise to claims that information-intensive activities are becoming footloose. One of the assumptions underlying these claims is that the cost of distance in telecommunications is negligible or very low. This paper examines the relationship between distance and interaction (telecommunications and transportation) costs and rates, with particular emphasis on the effects of geographical scale. Focusing on data from Israel, it demonstrates that the costs of distance are persistent even in telecommunications systems; that for short distances or small regions, transportation costs are not necessarily higher than telecommunications costs; and that pricing of telecommunications services by governments (or PTT's) often does not reflect the costs of providing the services. This creates a cost distribution which differs from Euclidean geographical distances: discontinuities in the rate structure of telecommunications distort the distance-cost schedules and, by creating barriers, may affect location decisions. The paper also demonstrates that actual interaction costs are context specific and therefore no general model has been formulated. Instead, an accounting procedure, which can be used by decision-makers considering (re)location in specific contexts, is suggested.

The paper uses existing human capital theory to provide a unified explanation of the education, age, race, and income characteristics of migrants. The hypothesis is formulated that the better educated, the younger, and the middle-income groups are more mobile than the less educated, the older and the very lowor very high-income groups respectively. Nonwhites are expected to be less mobile than whites during periods of high unemployment in the economy. Empirical evidence concerning migrants to and from 93 SMSA's of the United States supports the theoretical hypotheses.