Natural Advantage, Location and Trade Patterns in Increasing Returns to Scale Industries

In a two sectors, two regions economy I show that the higher increasing returns to scale of an industry, the easier it will concentrate in response to natural advantage. To this end, one sector is assumed to be perfectly competitive and the other is monopolistically competitive, with a region’s firms producing at a lower marginal cost than the others in the monopolistic sector (or equivalently producing varieties more intensely demanded by consumers). If capital is mobile between regions in the long run, I analytically characterize the process of industrial location of the imperfectly competitive sector in the region with the comparative advantage

Harris and Wilson (1978) Model Revisited: The Spatial Period-doubling Cascade in an Urban Retail Model

Harris and Wilson (1978)’s retail location model is one of the pioneering works in regional sciences on the combination of the “fast” and “slow” dynamic describing spatial pattern formation processes in the economic landscape, which is a current well-established modeling technique. Although proposed some time ago, the comparative static (bifurcation) properties of the model have not yet been sufficiently explored. We employ a simple analytical approach developed by Akamatsu et al. (2012) to reveal previously unknown bifurcation properties of the model in a space with a large number of locations. It is analytically shown that the evolutionary path of spatial structure exhibits a remarkable property, namely “spatial period- doubling cascade,” which we cannot observe in the popular two-location setup. We also discuss strong linkages between the model and the models of “new economic geography” regarding the modeling strategies and their bifurcation properties

Harris and Wilson (1978) Model Revisited: The Spatial Period-doubling Cascade in an Urban Retail Model

Harris and Wilson (1978)’s retail location model is one of the pioneering works in regional sciences. This model considers the combination of the “fast” and “slow” dynamics to describe spontaneous spatial pattern formation processes in the economic landscape. Although the model was proposed some time ago, its comparative static (bifurcation) properties have not yet been sufficiently explored. We employ a simple analytical approach developed by Akamatsu et al. (2012) to reveal previously unknown bifurcation properties of the model in a space with a large number of locations. It is analytically shown that the spatial structure’s evolutionary path exhibits a remarkable property, namely a “spatial period-doubling cascade,” which cannot be observed in the popular two-location setup. Furthermore, we discuss strong linkages between the model and “new economic geography” models in terms of their model structures and bifurcation properties. These results offer a new theoretical perspective for understanding agglomeration and spatial structure evolution

Policy Competition and the Spatial Economy

Groot, H.L.F. de [Promotor]Verhoef, E.T. [Promotor

Modelling of Agglomeration and Dispersion in RHOMOLO

The present paper describes the strategy of modelling endogenous location taken in the newly developed dynamic spatial general equilibrium model RHOMOLO. The model incorporates three mechanisms of endogenous location: mobility of capital, mobility of labour, and vertical linkages of intermediate goods. The spatial equilibrium in RHOMOLO is an outcome of optimisation involving many dispersion/agglomeration forces and channels of adjustment.JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growt

Harris and Wilson (1978) Model Revisited: The Spatial Period-doubling Cascade in an Urban Retail Model

Harris and Wilson (1978)’s retail location model is one of the pioneering works in regional sciences on the combination of the “fast” and “slow” dynamic describing spatial pattern formation processes in the economic landscape, which is a current well-established modeling technique. Although proposed some time ago, the comparative static (bifurcation) properties of the model have not yet been sufficiently explored. We employ a simple analytical approach developed by Akamatsu et al. (2012) to reveal previously unknown bifurcation properties of the model in a space with a large number of locations. It is analytically shown that the evolutionary path of spatial structure exhibits a remarkable property, namely “spatial period- doubling cascade,” which we cannot observe in the popular two-location setup. We also discuss strong linkages between the model and the models of “new economic geography” regarding the modeling strategies and their bifurcation properties

Macroeconomic Policy in DGSE and Agent-Based Models Redux:New Developments and Challenges Ahead

The Great Recession seems to be a natural experiment for economic analysis, in that it has shown the inadequacy of the predominant theoretical framework | the New Neoclassical Synthesis (NNS) | grounded on the DSGE model. In this paper, we present a critical discussion of the theoretical, empirical and political-economy pitfalls of the DSGE-based approach to policy analysis. We suggest that a more fruitful research avenue should escape the strong theoretical requirements of NNS models (e.g., equilibrium, rationality, representative agent, etc.) and consider the economy as a complex evolving system, i.e. as an ecology populated by heterogeneous agents, whose far-from-equilibrium interactions continuously change the structure of the system. This is indeed the methodological core of agent-based computational economics (ACE), which is presented in this paper. We also discuss how ACE has been applied to policy analysis issues, and we provide a survey of macroeconomic policy applications ( fiscal and monetary policy, bank regulation, labor market structural reforms and climate change interventions). Finally, we conclude by discussing the methodological status of ACE, as well as the problems it raises