La concentración territorial de las empresas industriales: un estudio sobre la unidad geográfica de análisis mediante técnicas de econometría espacial

Existe una clara evidencia acerca de la elevada concentración del empleo industrial a lo largo de la geografía española. El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar la idoneidad de los índices de concentración geográfica utilizados tradicionalmente así como cuál es la unidad administrativa de análisis adecuada en este tipo de análisis. Para ello se dispone de una base de datos muy novedosa que facilita información de ámbito municipal del empleo de los diferentes sectores manufactureros. Se comprueba que los resultados de los índices de concentración industrial obtenidos para las provincias y los municipios difieren sustancialmente. Esta evidencia plantea la posibilidad que la unidad de análisis deba situarse en un punto intermedio entre el municipio y la provincia de manera que recoja adecuadamente la noción de área económicamente representativa. Los índices de dependencia espacial, enmarcados en las técnicas de la Econometría Espacial, permiten contrastar la existencia de agrupaciones municipales en las que se detecta una elevada concentración de la actividad manufacturera analizada. Los resultados indican que efectivamente para algunas de las actividades manufactureras analizadas el área de especialización va más allá de los límites administrativos municipales

The growth of cities: Does agglomeration matter?

Does agglomeration influence the growth capacity of cities? Would an excessive agglomeration diminish this capacity? In the document the factors determining the growth of Spanish cities from 1981 to 2000 are examined. From recent theoretical approaches, these determining factors are the ones that affect the productivity of the firms, the quality of life for the inhabitants and the availability of land. After developing the theoretical model, the results of the empirical analysis applied to the large cities indicate that the initial conditions of 1981 effectively influence the capacity for growth of these cities. The cities that start with higher levels of population, general economic activity, industrial activity and unemployment and lower levels of technology and surface area present lower rates of economic and demographic growth. Reproducing the analysis for sub-periods (the decades of the eighties and the nineties), it has been demonstrated that, in spite of obtaining similar results, the factors that determine the growth of cities change over time

Spatial dependence and Kaldor's laws: Evidence for the European regions

In this paper we provide an outline of Kaldor's growth model and tests its relevance to the economic experience of European regions during the 1984-1992 period. The Kaldor's first law asserts that manufacturing is the engine of economic growth. The second proposition, also known as Verdoorn's law, states that there is a strong positive relation between the productivity growth in manufacturing and the output growth of manufacturing. The third law suggests that overall productivity growth is positively related to output growth in manufacturing and negatively related to the employment of non manufacturing sectors. The empirical results, corrected for the presence of spatial autocorrelation, indicates that Kaldor's second and third laws are compatible with the economic growth of European regions during the period 1984-1992. Keywords: Kaldor's laws, regional economics, spatial autocorrelation

Lobbying, political competition, and local land supply: recent evidence from Spain

We analyze whether local land supply is influenced by the degree of political competition, and interpret the findings as being indicative of the influence wielded by land development lobbies. We use a new database including both political and land supply data for more than 2,000 Spanish municipalities for the period 2003-2007. In Spain, land use policies are largely a local responsibility with municipalities having periodically to pass compre- hensive land use plans. The main policy variable in these plans, and the one analyzed here, is the amount of land classified for potential development. We measure local political competition as the margin of victory of the incumbent government. We instrument this variable using the number of votes obtained by parties represented in local government when standing at the first national legislative elections following the re-establishment of democracy, and the number of votes they actually obtained regionally at the national legislative elections. The results indicate that stiffer political competition does indeed reduce the amount of new land designated for development. This effect is found to be most marked in suburbs, in towns with a high percent of commuters and homeowners, and in municipalities governed by the left.urban growth controls, political economy, land use regulations

Industrial Location At the Intra-Metropolitan Level: A Negative Binomial Approach

The objective of this paper is to analyse the incidence of agglomeration economies on the new firms’ location decisions inside metropolitan areas. Following the literature we consider that agglomeration economies are related to the concentration of an industry (location economies) and/or the size of the city itself (urbanisation economies). We assume that those economies differ according the technological level of firms. So we use a sample of new firms belonging to high, intermediate and low technology levels. Our results confirm those sectoral differences and show some interesting location patterns of manufacturing firms Taking into account the renovated debate about the importance of the geography and distance in the location of economic activity, we introduce in the estimation the effect of the central city size as determinant for the location of new firms in the rest of the metropolitan area. This allows us to analyse if a suburbanisation effect exists and if that effect is the same depending on the industry and the central city size of the metropolitan area. Our main statistical source is the REI (Spanish Industrial Establishments Register), which has plant-level microdata for the creation and location of new industrial firms.

Local spending and the housing boom

We study the inter-temporal spending behavior of Spanish local governments during the last housing boom (1997-2006), a period of substantial short-run momentum in housingconstruction revenues. We argue that the unprecedented growth in these revenues might be one of the reasons underlying the increase in the sensitivity of local government spending to (predictable) revenue changes. To detect evidence of this, we study whether local spending decisions are consistent with forward-looking behavior, working within the framework provided by Holtz-Eakin et al. (1994). Our principal findings are: (i) Local spending shows substantial sensitivity to predictable changes in revenues, suggesting that Spanish local governments did not behave as fully forward-looking agents. (ii) The departure from this benchmark was much higher in those years and/or in those housing markets in which the housing boom was most intense. (iii) The sensitivity was not as great to changes in housing construction revenues as it was to changes in ordinary revenues, but this distinction became blurred as the boom intensified

Banking the unbanked: Evidence from the Spanish banking expansion plan

What are the benefits of lifting structural impediments to banking the unbanked? We address this question by studying the Spanish Banking Expansion Plan 1964-1974, a program aimed at extending banking services into unbanked municipalities after decades of banking status quo. We exploit the quasi-experimental nature of the program to identify its effects. Selected municipalities experienced a 9% increase in the number of workers per inhabitant. This effect was driven by the lending channel, primarily through the provision of liquidity and working capital, though not through the savings channel

Banking towards development: Evidence from the Spanish banking expansion plan

During the period 1965-1987 Spain was an emerging market in full transition from developing to developed status. During the same period the Spanish banking system underwent an unprecedented episode of expansion growing from 5,000 to over 30,000 bank branches. We examine whether the latter process partly caused the former by focusing on the relationship between branch expansion and entrepreneurship in the wholesale and retail trade industries. To address the non-random allocation of bank branches we exploit changes in branching policies that induced a plausibly exogenous time-varying pattern in the relationship between a municipality’s initial financial development and branch expansion. Our estimates, based on a panel data-set of over 2,000 Spanish municipalities, reveal that branch expansion had a strong positive impact on entrepreneurship. This effect was essentially driven by the savings banks, which have stronger regional development objectives than those held by the commercial banks, and which expanded more intensely into municipalities with more precarious financial services

Lobbying, political competition, and local land supply: recent evidence from Spain

We analyze whether local land supply is influenced by the degree of political competition, and interpret the findings as being indicative of the influence wielded by land development lobbies. We use a new database including both political and land supply data for more than 2,000 Spanish municipalities for the period 2003-2007. In Spain, land use policies are largely a local responsibility with municipalities having periodically to pass compre- hensive land use plans. The main policy variable in these plans, and the one analyzed here, is the amount of land classified for potential development. We measure local political competition as the margin of victory of the incumbent government. We instrument this variable using the number of votes obtained by parties represented in local government when standing at the first national legislative elections following the re-establishment of democracy, and the number of votes they actually obtained regionally at the national legislative elections. The results indicate that stiffer political competition does indeed reduce the amount of new land designated for development. This effect is found to be most marked in suburbs, in towns with a high percent of commuters and homeowners, and in municipalities governed by the left

Housing booms and busts and local fiscal policy [WP]

This paper examines how local governments adjust their spending, savings and taxes in response to a temporary revenue windfall generated by a housing boom and how they cope with the inevitable shortfall that appears during the bust. We focus on Spanish local governments given the intensity of the last housing boom-bust experienced there and the large share of construction-related revenues they obtain. We find, first, that just a small share of the boom windfall was saved, with revenues being used primarily to increase spending (above all, current spending) and (to a lesser extent) cut taxes. Second, we find that the failure to save during the boom is higher in places with less informed voters and more contested elections. Third, we also examine what happens during the bust, and find that these governments had to cut abruptly their spending (above all, capital), raise taxes, and allow deficits to grow. Finally, in places wit less informed voters and more contested elections local governments had more trouble in adjusting during the bust, and they tend to rely more on spending cuts than on tax increases