This paper investigates the growth and clustering of craft breweries in New Jersey. We compiled a historical dataset from 1995 to 2020 that allows us to measure the degree of geographic clustering among craft breweries in New Jersey. The number of craft breweries in New Jersey grew 491% from 2012 to 2020 (from 22 to 130 craft breweries). An impetus for this growth was that New Jersey enacted legislation in 2012 that made opening and operating a craft brewery in the state more economically viable. Our analysis finds that craft breweries in New Jersey are clustering in specific parts of the state and that this is likely due to co-location benefits such as building a culture of craft beer that drives innovation, knowledge sharing, customer sharing, and a thicker labor market. While distinct craft beer clusters have formed in New Jersey, we find there is still significant opportunity for growth. Our analysis confirms this using data on planned craft brewery openings to measure changes in the size and density of clusters and where, in New Jersey, new clusters are likely to form.

The literature on the impacts of transport corridors points to a tradeoff between income and environmental quality. We estimate the impacts of India's Golden Quadrilateral and North-South-East-West highways on income and environmental quality to test this tradeoff hypothesis. Applying the difference-in-difference method to district level data, we find that the highways increased both local income and particulate matter air pollution. The estimated increase in air pollution is robust to using an instrumental variables approach, while that in income is not. Examining heterogeneity in these impacts, we find that the income–environment tradeoff was less steep in districts with initially higher educational attainment rates because they experienced a smaller increase in air pollution due to the highways.

How is the rise of platform capitalism reinventing the traditional regime of familial production, while at the same time being energized by it? How do the historically informed, lived experiences of rural e-commerce entrepreneurs or workers in China help reconceptualize digital labor and platform studies? Deploying the analytic of platformized family production, this article addresses these questions through a deep description of the experiences of variously positioned platform-based and mediated laborers in an e-commerce village in East China. I argue that the ongoing process of platformizing family production is profoundly contradictory. As an alternative to a model of development based on unevenness and the rural-urban divide, village e-commerce has created opportunities for peasants and marginalized urban youth to achieve social mobility. However, it also shapes a new regime of value that privileges the individualized e-commerce entrepreneur as an ideal subject, and fetishizes and instrumentalizes innovation and creativity in conformity with the global intellectual property regime. These tendencies not only contradict the reality of collective labor organization both on e-commerce platforms and in villages, but also conflict with the indispensable role of manual labor in the production process—reinforcing rather than overcoming existing inequalities and stratification in rural China.

This article examines the key features of the UK’s spatial productivity relationships and discusses some of the key questions currently being articulated or debated as they relate to potential devolution-related discussions. The paper demonstrates that the local productivity challenges facing UK regions are nationwide in nature rather than local, and systemic rather than specific. In particular, the scale-productivity relationships across cities and regions which are evident in almost all other OECD countries are largely absent in the UK. Instead, previous prosperity is the dominant marker of current local prosperity, suggesting that cumulative causation processes define the UK regional and urban economic landscape rather than scale relations. This article explains these features in a manner which is accessible to a wide audience, in order to provide greater clarity regarding the fundamental economic problems to be addressed and also the underlying objectives which the Levelling Up agenda needs to achieve.

This paper reports on the availability of regional capital stock data,1 in the form of new/updated regional (NUTS2 level) capital stock estimates,2 building on an approach (Perpetual Inventory Method) which had been previously developed for the European Commission. The particular focus here is on the UK and how these data are used to shed light on regional labour productivity disparities. Using a NUTS2 level dataset constructed for the period 2000–16, we use a dynamic spatial panel approach from Baltagi et al. (2019) to estimate a model relating productivity to output (growth or levels) and augmented by explicit incorporation of capital stock plus various other covariates such as human capital. We find that regional variations in capital stocks per worker make a significant contribution to regional variations in labour productivity, but the geography of human capital is also highly relevant. Moreover, we give evidence to show that as human capital rises, notably as we move from the regions to London, the impact of capital stock per worker is less. The effect of capital stock depends on the level of human capital.

This paper explores the nature and scale of inter-regional and inter-urban inequalities in the UK in the context of international comparisons and our aim is to identify the extent to which such inequalities are associated with strong national economic performance. In order to do this, we first discuss the evolution of UK interregional inequalities relative to comparator European economies over more than a century. We then focus specifically on comparisons between the UK and the reunified Germany. These two exercises demonstrate that the experience of the UK has been rather different to other countries. We further explore UK inter-urban inequalities in the light of international evidence and then explain why observations of cities only tell us a partial story about the nature of interregional inequalities, especially in the case of the UK. Finally, we move onto an OECD-wide analysis of the relationships between economic growth and interregional inequality. What we observe is that any such relationships are very weak, and the only real evidence of a positive relationship is in the post-2008 crisis period, a result which points to differentials in regional resilience rather than inequality-led growth. Moreover, once former transition economies are removed from the sample, the relationship disappears, or if anything becomes slightly negative. As such, the international evidence suggests that the UK’s very high spatial inequalities have hampered, rather than facilitated, national economic growth.

Online marketplaces could help direct-to-consumer (DTC) farms compete for customers making grocery purchases on the internet by reducing the search and transportation costs of in-person DTC transactions. While in-person DTC marketplaces have been conducive for metropolitan farms historically, we explore whether rural DTC farms, with distance-based challenges accessing customers, are more likely to have online platforms. We find that rural farms distant from metropolitan counties that are new to DTC marketing are 7% more likely to have online marketplaces than more experienced rural farms, while new metropolitan farms are less likely to have them.

Recent studies have shown a strong link between the complexity of economies and their economic development. There remain gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these links, in part because they are difficult to analyse with highly aggregated, official data sources that do not capture the emergence of new industrial activities, a potential benefit from complexity. We seek to address some of these gaps by calculating two indices of economic complexity for functional local economies (Travel to Work Areas) in Great Britain, and explore their link with these locations’ economic performance. Seeking to gain a better understanding of the mechanism connecting economic complexity with economic performance, we create a measure of emergent technological activity in a location based on a combination of novel data sources including text from UK business websites and CrunchBase, a technology company directory, and study its link with economic complexity. Our results highlight the potential value of novel, unstructured data sources for the analysis of the links between economic complexity and regional economic development.

Researchers and citizens alike question the long-term impacts of the shale oil boom on local communities. Studies have considered the boom’s effects on employment, income, mobility, and human capital acquisition. This research specifically builds on research considering shale effects on secondary schooling. Using county-level data from Texas, we investigate two questions: (1) Has the latest oil boom led to a reduction in local high school graduation? (2) Is this effect different for immigrants, a group potentially vulnerable to local wage effects? Findings indicate insignificant overall effects; however, local oil drilling increases immigrant high school dropout rates.

This paper examines trends in the socioeconomic well-being in rural counties where Black residents represent one third or more of the population. These racially diverse rural counties (RDRCs) are located exclusively in the rural South and generally have low levels of economic well-being. On a positive note, college education levels in RDRCs are found to have increased rapidly between 1990 and 2000. Regression analysis suggests that these increases were in part due to the concentration of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the region. Local investments in K-12 education are also found to be linked to county education levels.

A national survey of broiler industry executives is conducted to analyze site-specific factors related to the broiler-complex location problem. Conjoint analysis is used to analyze the broiler complex location decision. Feed costs, community attitude toward the broiler industry, availability of geographically concentrated growers, unemployment rates, and wage rates were found to be the top five factors affecting broiler company location decisions. The quality of roads between feed mill and growers; electricity, heating, water, and sewage costs; and the number of potential growers in the region were also found to be important.

This article analyzes the economies of capacity use regarding hot water decontamination to reduce postslaughter risk of pathogens in meat, taking interfarm heterogeneities of Salmonella risk and costs of transportation into account, using Denmark as a case study. If risk reduction goals are stated at the processing plant level, then the exploitation of the favorable cost-effectiveness properties of hot water slaughtering requires fairly ambitious risk reduction goals and thus high use of decontamination capacity. If instead risk reduction goals are formulated for the sector as a whole, the cost-effectiveness properties can be exploited even for relatively low-risk reduction goals.

In coastal communities with uniform flood risk, amenity value is comprised of two components – view and access. Having controlled for view, it is assumed that any residual amenity value represents the benefit derived from accessing the beach for leisure/recreational purposes. However, as properties closer to the beach typically have improved viewsheds, the two amenities are highly correlated, and disentangling view and access is problematical. A spatial autoregressive hedonic model captures ease of beach access via a network distance parameter that varies independently from property viewshed, collinearity effects are mitigated, and access and view can be disentangled.

This article examines the marketing and distribution of foreign fabric, predominantly English, in the northern sub-plateau of Spain at the beginning of the 18th century using information from a fiscal source. The official tax record used in this study was a specific and special tax levied on cloth imported from countries with which Spain was at war. The details of this tax shed more light on a hotly debated topic with respect to transport and networks in modern Spain and make it possible to analyze and quantify the physical volume as well as the value and the destination of textiles.

Since the Lisbon agenda (2000), European policies are increasingly oriented towards R&D and innovation. In this context, we analyze the effects of a centralized R&D subsidy policy upon steady state and welfare using an agglomeration and growth model composed of two asymmetric countries. If the policy leads to a steady state characterized by a higher growth rate and lower inequalities, the welfare analysis provides a more contrasted vision on the effects of the policy. Indeed, even though such a policy can eliminate some distortions and improve global welfare, it implies a zero-sum game at national level (the policy increases the welfare in the periphery country and decreases the welfare in the core country) when knowledge spillovers are sufficiently localized. Consequently, a centralized R&D subsidy policy conducted in an economy composed of two asymmetric countries would be a positive-sum game only if international knowledge spillovers are sufficiently large.

We study a spatial competition model which is a variant of the celebrated Hotelling (1929) framework. One of the firm is a brick-and-mortar one while the other is on-line. Both firms sell the same product except that (constant) marginal costs may differ. Consumers going to the shop around the corner face transportation costs according to their adress whereas on-line consumers bear a fix cost that may capture technological burden and risk premium. In the pricing Nash equilibria the “new economy” firm has smaller market shares eventhough it offers more attractive prices. For the on-line firm to become a leader, the cost difference must be large enough to offset the comparative disadvantage it face on the demand side. In the long run, increasing competition ultimately forces the local firm out of downtown. We argue that this effect may be related to some of the forecasts concerning the geographical impact of the development of remote access services.

This paper provides a bird-eye overview of the history of spatial economic theory. It is organized around three main ideas (and authors): (i) land use and urban economics (Thünen), (ii) the nature of competition across space (Hotelling), and (iii) new economic geography and the emergence of economic agglomerations (Krugman).

There is a general presumption in urban economics that average commuting costs are increasing in city size. By analogy, it might be supposed that other spatial costs, such as distribution costs for utility services or access costs to schools and hospitals, will have the same characteristic. However, the basic commuting result derives from an urban model in which population density is uniform out to the city boundary and commuters travel individually and radially to the central business district. It is more realistic to suppose that population density declines away from the centre, as in the standard monocentric urban model and that there are likely to be scale economies in both commuting (e.g. from use of buses or metros) and distribution (e.g. larger diameter water mains). The aim of this paper is to explore the implications of such factors for spatial costs, using data on water distribution costs for 35 “urban districts” in the supply area of one of the water companies in England & Wales. Distribution cost elasticities are quantified for two contrasting urban development scenarios, confirming that in the case of Suburbanization average distribution costs are increasing in city size, as generally assumed; however, in the case of Densification these costs are decreasing in city size. The interaction with water production costs is also considered, showing that, in the case of Densification, scale economies in production are reinforced by density economies in distribution, whereas in the case of Suburbanisation they are offset to a greater or lesser extent by diseconomies in distribution, i.e. higher spatial costs. A final section relates these findings to the literature on commuting costs, urban agglomeration and sprawl. It is concluded that high density settlement has the potential to reduce average costs in distribution (including commuting) as well as production, so that both favour agglomeration. Accordingly, urban modelers should be cautious about assuming that commuting (and other spatial costs) are always increasing in city size.

A partir des données de l'enquête SINE 98 de l'INSEE, une étude économétrique de la survie des entreprises culturelles fait apparaître les résultats suivants. Premièrement, le pourcentage d'entreprises qui meurent chaque année n'est pas stable au cours du temps et diffère selon le secteur considéré (arts visuels, spectacle vivant, patrimoine, édition, audiovisuel ou produits culturels). Le risque artisanal est très fort les trois ou quatre premières années alors que le risque industriel apparaît une fois ces premières années passées. Deuxièmement, le taux de survie des entreprises culturelles est très sensible à leur regroupement géographique. Si la proximité d'entreprises ayant la même activité est néfaste à la survie des entreprises culturelles, une forte concentration d'activités culturelles variées est très fortement bénéfique à leur survie. L'effet de synergie l'emporte sur l'effet de concurrence. Il donne un fondement à la productivité des regroupements d'entreprises culturelles qualifiés de pôle de compétitivité culturel ou de district culturel.

Ce papier analyse la dynamique de la spécialisation des activités technologiques mesurées par les brevets de 221 régions européennes sur la période 1989-2000. L'approche adoptée repose sur la spécification d'un modèle à erreurs composées et à coefficients variables. La modélisation prend en compte l'impact des spécificités régionales sur la vitesse de convergence technologique et étudie comment la croissance économique affecte la spécialisation des régions. Les résultats d'estimation montrent (i) une convergence (dé-spécialisation) des activités technologiques régionales. Les vitesses de déspécialisation varient selon les régions de 0% à 8% par an. (ii) Les capacités inventives initiales et les effets nationaux apparaissent comme des facteurs de décélération de la vitesse de convergence technologique, (iii) l'effet de la croissance économique sur la spécialisation est positif pour les régions à forte propension à breveter mais négatif pour les régions à faibles capacités inventives, toutes choses égales par ailleurs.