Regional economic effects of revitalization of industrial sites: an input-output approach

This subject of this paper is the regional economic effects of revitalisation of industrial sites. From an economic point of view an ageing industrial site is one with underused capacity that leads to a suboptimal level of investment. The assumption made in this paper is that due to markets failures space on industrial site is used inefficiently and that governments intervene to reduce underutilization of available space. Fieldwork and literature show that the economic effects of revitalization are one of the most important inputs for decision making on revitalization. The paper describes a model (ACER) for estimating the regional economic effects and the results of application of ACER on revitalization of ?Lage Weide?, an industrial site in the city of Utrecht. The starting point of ACER is an intervention on the industrial site, resulting in growth of firms and employment on the site or a change of composition of firms and employment. This change has an economic impact on the site itself and on the rest of the city. ACER estimates this impact in terms of employment. The basis of the model is a biregional input-output table describing all economic transactions of several industrial and service sectors with each other. The two regions distinguished in the biregional table are the industrial site and the rest of the city. The model gives the direct and indirect effects of revitalization for both the site and the rest of city in terms of employment broken down in gender and level of education as well as an indication of change in land prices. The development ACER is part of the EU-project MASURIN leaded by TNO MEP (Environment, Energy and Politics). MASURIN, the Management of Sustainable Revitalisation of Industrial Sites, aims at providing tools and knowledge for policy makers in cities and public bodies. Several institutes and cities participate in this project.

White dwarf masses in cataclysmic variables

The white dwarf (WD) mass distribution of cataclysmic variables (CVs) has recently been found to dramatically disagree with the predictions of the standard CV formation model. The high mean WD mass among CVs is not imprinted in the currently observed sample of CV progenitors and cannot be attributed to selection effects. Two possibilities have been put forward: either the WD grows in mass during CV evolution, or in a significant fraction of cases, CV formation is preceded by a (short) phase of thermal time-scale mass transfer (TTMT) in which the WD gains a sufficient amount of mass. We investigate if either of these two scenarios can bring theoretical predictions and observations into agreement. We employed binary population synthesis models to simulate the present intrinsic CV population. We incorporated aspects specific to CV evolution such as an appropriate mass-radius relation of the donor star and a more detailed prescription for the critical mass ratio for dynamically unstable mass transfer. We also implemented a previously suggested wind from the surface of the WD during TTMT and tested the idea of WD mass growth during the CV phase by arbitrarily changing the accretion efficiency. We compare the model predictions with the characteristics of CVs derived from observed samples. We find that mass growth of the WDs in CVs fails to reproduce the observed WD mass distribution. In the case of TTMT, we are able to produce a large number of massive WDs if we assume significant mass loss from the surface of the WD during the TTMT phase. However, the model still produces too many CVs with helium WDs. Moreover, the donor stars are evolved in many of these post-TTMT CVs, which contradicts the observations. We conclude that in our current framework of CV evolution neither TTMT nor WD mass growth can fully explain either the observed WD mass or the period distribution in CVs.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in A&A. Replaced and added a reference, corrected typo