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Three Essays on Regional and Urban Economics

Deng, Nanxin
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563314229242396

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics.
This dissertation is composed of three chapters on regional and urban economics. The first chapter evaluates a regional policy in China. “City-County Consolidation” has been used during the last two decades as a primary tool to promote urbanization in China. Previous studies suggest this policy promotes economic growth in the urban area. Yet the effect of urban-led policy on surrounding rural areas has not been investigated. Using both city-level and county-level data in China, I propose a Difference-in-Difference (DID) framework to examine the impact of such consolidation on unconsolidated rural counties within the same prefectures. I further discuss the mechanism and the heterogeneous effect according to a machine learning tree approach. In the short term, the results suggest that consolidation leads to a significant loss of GDP per capita in surrounding rural counties. I also find that this policy has no significant effect at the prefecture level, although previous research finds that this policy has fostered agglomeration in the urban core. Therefore, consolidation seems to merely redistribute short-run economic activities across space, which exacerbates regional economic disparities. The second chapter examines the effect of city size on innovation. Innovation is an important driving force of regional and urban development. Cities of different size tend to have different innovative activities. The previous theoretical literature on agglomeration has suggested that city size may affect innovation through localization economies (e.g., input sharing, labor market matching, and knowledge spillovers) and urbanization economies (scale effects and urban diversity). However, whether urbanization economies come from city size or urban diversity is still under debate. This study aims to identify how city size effects innovation, controlling for the diversity effect and localization economies. I use city-level data in China to investigate how city size affects local patent intensity. Both 2SLS methods with different instrumental variables and a difference-in-difference framework with a quasi-experiment design are used to address the potential endogeneity issues. I find that city size has a significant positive effect on patent intensity in general, but this effect decreases with population size and shows clear heterogeneity across geographical locations. The results are robust to different specifications and methodologies. The findings are also consistent with previous theory and empirical evidence. The third chapter explains the reasons for the decreasing migration flows in the United States. Migration has been viewed as critical for the flexibility of the U.S. labor market, but its role of smoothing out macroeconomic shocks has been falling in recent years (Partridge et al. 2012). This study investigates the reasons for decreasing migration flows and provides evidence for the link between dwindling migration and increasing industry mobility in the United States from 2005 to 2015. Linked to the labor search theory (Mortenson, 1986), this study illustrates how industry mobility substitute for migration flows. Empirical results suggest that industry mobility is inversely associated with out-migration rate. The role of migration for smoothing out demand shocks becomes less important in regions where industry mobility rates are high. The findings justify that the increasing industry mobility can explain the decreasing migration flows in the U.S.
Mark Partridge (Advisor)
Wuyang Hu (Committee Member)
Abdoul Sam (Committee Member)
123 p.
Economics; Regional Studies
Agglomeration; City size; Innovation; Migration

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Citations

  • Deng, N. (2019). Three Essays on Regional and Urban Economics [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563314229242396

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Deng, Nanxin. Three Essays on Regional and Urban Economics. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563314229242396.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Deng, Nanxin. "Three Essays on Regional and Urban Economics." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1563314229242396

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1563314229242396
465
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