Most recent papers:

• Balanced Skills and the City: An Analysis of the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Skill Balance, Thickness, and Innovation.
  Elisabeth Bublitz, Michael Fritsch, Michael Wyrwich.
  Economic Geography. July 14, 2015
  Entrepreneurs are assumed to be multiskilled, covering a number of skills and achieving in each skill a level as high as possible. Being such a jack‐of‐all‐trades increases the probability of running an entrepreneurial venture successfully, but what happens to the jack‐of‐few‐trades who lacks sufficient skills? This article investigates a possible compensation mechanism between balanced skills and cities and how this compensatory measure relates to performance. Specifically, we test and find support for the idea put forward by Helsley and Strange that high market thickness, such as that found in cities, can compensate for a lack of entrepreneurial skill balance. The results indicate that entrepreneurs with low skill balance benefit more from being located in cities than their counterparts with high skill balance. Innovative firms do not differ from other businesses in this respect.

  July 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12097   open full text
• New Regimes of Responsibilization: Practicing Product Carbon Footprinting in the New Carbon Economy.
  Jim Ormond.
  Economic Geography. July 14, 2015
  This article discusses how by voluntarily adopting new dimensions of corporate responsibility—for the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by its products—global retailers not only position their organizations as responsible in the battle to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of their consumers, but also articulate a new solution for the mitigation of climate change aligned with their commercial interests. As part of this solution, retailers (and other brands) reimagined how GHG emissions should be allocated—shifting from a productionist‐based to a consumptionist‐based perspective—and redefined what they are responsible for and what their supply chains must care about. The article argues that the complexity involved in engaging tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual organizations across numerous products’ supply chains means that requirements to measure and reduce a product's carbon footprint cannot, and are not, simply pushed down a supply chain. Rather through a confluence of the practices of translation, observation, and normalization retailers are creating, fostering, and articulating new regimes of responsibilization within which actors across successive tiers of a product's supply chains must measure, monitor, and reduce their own carbon footprints independently, conscientiously, and diligently, thereby enabling retailers to achieve carbon reductions at a distance. Seen through the Foucauldian‐inspired lens of the technologies of the self and self‐government under neoliberal governance regimes, this article suggests that, through the control of what is in a product's carbon footprint, how this should be measured, and how it should be reduced—what are called here carbon truths—global retailers are working to consolidate their socioeconomic powers as sustainability leaders that fundamentally direct society's response to, and mitigation of, climate change.© 2014 Clark University

  July 14, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12095   open full text
• European Migration, National Origin and Long‐term Economic Development in the United States.
  Andrés Rodríguez‐Pose, Viola von Berlepsch.
  Economic Geography. June 05, 2015
  Have Irish, German, or Italian settlers arriving in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century left a trace that determines differences in economic development to this day? Does the national origin of migrants matter for long‐term development? This article explores whether the distinct geographic settlement patterns of European migrants according to national origin affected economic development across U.S. counties. It uses microdata from the 1880 and 1910 censuses in order to identify where migrants from different nationalities settled and then regresses current levels of economic development on settlement patterns according to national origin, using both ordinary least squares and instrumental variable approaches. The analysis controls for a number of factors that would have determined the attractiveness of different U.S. counties at the time of migration as well as current levels of development. The results indicate that while there is a strong and positive impact associated with overall migration, differences in the quality of the institutions of the countries of origin of the migrant are not necessarily a good predictor for current levels of economic development of U.S. counties.

  June 05, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12099   open full text
• Bounded Entrepreneurial Vitality: The Mixed Embeddedness of Female Entrepreneurship.
  Thilde Langevang, Katherine V. Gough, Paul W. K. Yankson, George Owusu, Robert Osei.
  Economic Geography. May 09, 2015
  Despite the recent increased interest in female entrepreneurs, attention has tended to focus on dynamic individuals and generic incentives without considering the roles of gender and place in entrepreneurship. In this article, we draw on the notion of mixed embeddedness to explore how time‐and‐place–specific institutional contexts influence women's entrepreneurship. Drawing on primary data collected in Ghana, where exceptionally more women engage in entrepreneurial activities than men, we examine the scale and characteristics of female entrepreneurial activity, exploring the factors that account for this strong participation of women, and examine whether this high entrepreneurial rate is also reflected in their performance and growth aspirations. The findings reveal a disjuncture between, on the one hand, the vibrant entrepreneurial endeavors of Ghanaian women and positive societal attitudes toward female entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, female business activities characterized by vulnerability and relatively low achievement. The article shows how regulatory, normative, and cultural–cognitive institutional forces, which have been transformed over time by local and global processes and their interaction, are concomitantly propelling and impeding women's entrepreneurial activities. We propose that the study of female entrepreneurs within economic geography could be advanced by analyzing the differing effects of the complex, multiple, and shifting layers of institutional contexts in which they are embedded.

  May 09, 2015   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12092   open full text
• Merger and Acquisition Activity as Driver of Spatial Clustering: The Spatial Evolution of the Dutch Banking Industry, 1850–1993.
  Ron Boschma, Matté Hartog.
  Economic Geography. April 24, 2014
  This article investigates the extent to which merger and acquisition (M&A) activity contributed to the spatial clustering of the Dutch banking industry in Amsterdam. This analysis is based on a unique database of all banks in the Netherlands that existed in the period 1850–1993. We found that spatial clustering of the Dutch banking industry was not driven by the fact that banks performed better in the Amsterdam region: being located in Amsterdam decreased rather than increased the survival chances of banks. However, banks in Amsterdam were disproportionally active in acquiring other banks outside Amsterdam. Experience in M&As accumulated mainly in the Amsterdam region, which in turn had a positive impact on the survival chances of banks located there. Our findings suggest that M&A activity was a driving force behind the spatial clustering of the Dutch banking industry between 1850 and 1993.

  April 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12054   open full text
• Regional Branching Reconsidered: Emergence of the Fuel Cell Industry in European Regions.
  Anne Nygaard Tanner.
  Economic Geography. April 24, 2014
  The literature on economic geography suffers from a lack of attention to the emergence of new industries. Recent literature on “regional branching” proposes that new industries emerge in regions where preexisting economic activities are technologically related to the emerging industry. This article provides a more grounded basis for the emerging literature on regional branching by confronting the regional branching thesis with the realities of an emerging industry, namely, the fuel cell industry. The analysis is based on patent data and qualitative interviews conducted in a selection of European NUTS2 (nomenclature of territorial units for statistics) regions. The findings can be summarized as follows. First, the analysis reveals that in the case of the emerging fuel cell industry, regional diversification is dominated by firm diversification, which complements previous studies' findings that entrepreneurial spin‐offs dominate regional diversification. Second, the study corroborates the assumption that the process of regional branching relies on knowledge generated by nonindustrial actors such as universities and research institutes. Third, the findings suggest that care should be taken in ascribing the underlying logic of regional branching to the principle of technological relatedness alone. The article shows how some regional diversification processes occur in regions where preexisting economic activities are not technologically related to the emerging industry, for instance, when user industries apply new technologies to their product portfolio. The importance of further investigating and disentangling different dimensions of relatedness and their impact on regional branching is stressed.

  April 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12055   open full text
• Geographies of Securitized Catastrophe Risk and the Implications of Climate Change.
  Leigh Johnson.
  Economic Geography. January 23, 2014
  This article analyzes the drivers and implications of catastrophe bonds’ growing popularity as an alternative asset class. As investor demand for bonds outpaces their supply from reinsurers, the study asks how the place‐based physical vulnerabilities of fixed capital have been rendered into assets deemed increasingly desirable by growing blocks of financial capital. Combining data from extended interviews with industry datasets and market reports, the study demonstrates how this securitization pathway allows mobile capital on a search for yield to reframe spatial liabilities as tradable assets, thus accessing new “returns on place.” By aggregating and analyzing data on approximately $37 billion in catastrophe bond transactions since 1997, the study reveals both the ongoing concentration of capital in so‐called “peak perils” such as U.S. hurricane and earthquake risks, and the fragmentation and recombination of peak perils to create new risk/return profiles. These purposive, scalable, and selective financial engagements with catastrophic risks depend upon the avoidance of the fixed costs and relational entanglements borne by (re)insurers. This ambivalent relationship with geographical liabilities is reaching its logical apogee in recent proposals to expand the catastrophe bond market to capitalize on growing climate change risks. This movement to “underwrite to securitize” intentionally emulates the “originate to securitize” model pioneered in mortgage‐backed securities. This study argues that such developments could ultimately yield a built environment that is both more dependent on the state as an insurer of last resort and less adapted to climate extremes.

  January 23, 2014   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12048   open full text
• The Topological Multiplicities of Power: The Limits of Governing the Olympics.
  Martin Müller.
  Economic Geography. January 07, 2014
  This article proposes that economic geography would benefit from a closer consideration of the topological multiplicities of power, that is, the multiple contending configurations of networks that make power a precarious accomplishment through creating constant overflows. It develops this argument by tracing how the circulation of knowledge in the preparation for the Olympic Games establishes sociomaterial networks that are meant to allow the International Olympic Committee to coordinate the organization of the event. On the basis of Bruno Latour's concept of the oligopticon, the article develops a sociomaterial notion of power to govern at a distance that emerges through the triple movement of collecting and mobilizing information, casting it into stable intermediaries, and recirculating knowledge. At the same time, a parallel narrative considers how this power and its spatial reach remain always partial and are transformed by overflows as elements move in and out of networks and how forces outside the network bear on it, creating “absent presences.” Giving adequate attention to these topological multiplicities of sociomaterial networks offers an important counterweight to the dominant notion of stable social networks in economic geography and is particularly useful when analyzing the governance of projects and various other forms of ephemeral, distributed organizing.

  January 07, 2014   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12032   open full text
• White Knights from the Gulf: Sovereign Wealth Fund Investment and the Evolution of German Industrial Finance.
  Daniel Haberly.
  Economic Geography. December 16, 2013
  The period leading up to and following the global financial crisis has been characterized by rising global financial diversity and multipolarity, a process underscored by the growth of so‐called sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). To date there has not been any systematic examination of the interactions between this rising global financial diversity and national economic institutional diversity. Here I apply an institutional “comparative capitalisms” perspective to the analysis of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) SWF investment in German industry since the onset of the global financial crisis. The evidence demonstrates that a growing number of German industrial firms—particularly the major automotive firms at the heart of German industry—have recruited long‐term GCC SWF investment as an adaptive response to the stresses of financial restructuring, most importantly the appearance of hostile takeovers as a feature of the German corporate governance landscape. These patterns lend partial support to “varieties of capitalism” (VOC) arguments that institutional complementarity and comparative institutional advantage are likely to produce path dependent trajectories of national institutional evolution. They also lend partial support to critiques of VOC, emphasizing, on the one hand, the importance of the Polanyian “double movement” of market expansion and containment and, on the other, the transnational foundations of national institutional diversity. I conclude that to fully explain these patterns, both VOC theories of institutional complementarity and comparative advantage, and Polanyian theories of the double movement, must be grounded in a “generalized Darwinian” analysis of population‐level selection dynamics.

  December 16, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12047   open full text
• Local Externalities and Ownership Choices in Foreign Acquisitions by Multinational Enterprises.
  Sergio Mariotti, Lucia Piscitello, Stefano Elia.
  Economic Geography. December 12, 2013
  This article assesses the influence of spatial heterogeneity on the entry mode by multinational enterprises (MNEs) in foreign markets. Focusing on acquisitions, we claim that the location of the target firm influences the MNE's ownership choice. MNEs normally execute partial acquisitions to reduce their liability of foreignness and to preserve their target's inherent competencies, particularly in highly innovative and internationally competitive sectors. However, this phenomenon occurs less frequently if target firms are located in areas that are characterized by relevant externalities, such as core cities and industrial districts. In particular, core cities allow foreign MNEs to access a variety of information and knowledge as well as other externalities that are associated with international interconnectedness; industrial districts provide MNEs with easier access to industry‐specific agglomeration economies (a local pool of skilled labor, local input‐output linkages, and local knowledge spillovers). These locations provide substitutes for different aspects of the target firm's competences, thus reducing an MNE's need to maintain a local partner. Empirical evidence from foreign acquisitions of local manufacturing firms that occurred in Italy during the 2001–10 period confirms these expectations.

  December 12, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12039   open full text
• Advanced Producer Service Firms as Strategic Networks, Global Cities as Strategic Places.
  Peter J. Taylor, Ben Derudder, James Faulconbridge, Michael Hoyler, Pengfei Ni.
  Economic Geography. December 11, 2013
  Sassen's identification of global cities as “strategic places” is explored through world city network analysis. This involves searching out advanced producer service (APS) firms that constitute “strategic networks,” from whose activities strategic places can be defined. Twenty‐five out of 175 APS firms are found to be strategic, and from their office networks, 45 cities out of 526 are designated as strategic places. A measure of “strategicness” of cities is devised, and individual findings from this are discussed by drawing on existing literature about how APS firms use specific cities. A key finding shows that New York and London have different levels of strategicness, and this is related to the former's innovation prowess and the latter's role in global consumption of services. Other cases of strategicness discussed in terms of the balance between production and consumption of APSs are Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; Palo Alto; Mexico City; Johannesburg; and Dubai and Frankfurt.

  December 11, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12040   open full text
• The Effects of Industrial Clusters on the Poverty Rate.
  Christopher S. Fowler, Rachel Garshick Kleit.
  Economic Geography. November 08, 2013
  Industrial clusters are widely understood as a worthwhile target of local economic development resources. Nevertheless, most of the work on cluster development has asserted benefits that accrue to a regional economy as a whole, with little or no focus on specific links between clusters and poverty alleviation. This article seeks to understand the degree to which economic clusters are associated with lower poverty rates. Specifically, using spatial regression analysis techniques, we examine patterns that link clusters to poverty rates while controlling for the presence of other factors that shape the distribution of poverty in the United States. When controlling for other economic and demographic factors in a multivariate framework, the presence of industrial clusters is associated with lower poverty rates. Moreover, regions with a higher share of employment in clusters, and with that employment dispersed across many industries within the same cluster, fare even better than those where employment is concentrated in a single industry. Furthermore, while there is evidence that particular clusters are associated with significantly altered poverty rates, not all of these associations are beneficial.

  November 08, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12038   open full text
• A Fetish and Fiction of Finance: Unraveling the Subprime Crisis.
  Erica Pani, Nancy Holman.
  Economic Geography. September 06, 2013
  As the moderately strengthened financial regulation of Basel III comes into effect over the next seven years, this article sets out a cautionary reminder as to why regulation needs to move beyond a focus on the mitigation and distribution of risk. To do so, the article unravels the much‐misunderstood experiences of eight Norwegian municipalities whose investments plummeted as the subprime crisis unfolded: investments that had no immediate ties to subprime mortgage lending or mortgage‐backed securities. Focusing on the processes, practices, and instruments of financialization, the article puts forward two new analytical concepts—“the fetishization of the knowledge of risk” and “fictitious distance”—to help explain how the crisis spread so quickly and extensively that it threatened not only the municipalities' investments but also the functioning of global finance as a whole. In so doing, it becomes clear that financialization has set a far more risky form of capitalism that is manifest through concrete economic geographies, from towns and cities in the United States to “distant” Norwegian municipalities. In the highly interconnected entanglement of geographies and finance that make up the global financial system, the fetishes and fictions of finance cannot be ignored.

  September 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12027   open full text
• Accounting for Big‐City Growth in Low‐Paid Occupations: Immigration and/or Service‐Class Consumption.
  Ian Richard Gordon, Ioannis Kaplanis.
  Economic Geography. August 01, 2013
  The growth of “global cities” in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarization, including the increase in low‐paid service jobs. Although held to be untrue for European cities at the time, some such growth did emerge in London a decade later than first reported for New York. The question is whether there was simply a delay before London conformed to the global city model or whether another distinct cause was at work in both cases. This article proposes that the critical factor in both cases was actually an upsurge of immigration from poor countries that provided an elastic supply of cheap labor. This hypothesis and its counterpart based on the growth in elite jobs are tested econometrically for the British case with regional data spanning 1975–2008, finding some support for both effects, but with immigration from poor countries as the crucial influence in late 1990s London.

  August 01, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12026   open full text
• Cultural Diversity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship: Firm‐level Evidence from London.
  Max Nathan, Neil Lee.
  Economic Geography. July 02, 2013
  A growing body of research is making links between diversity and the economic performance of cities and regions. Most of the underlying mechanisms take place within firms, but only a handful of organization‐level studies have been conducted. We contribute to this underexplored literature by using a unique sample of 7,600 firms to investigate links among cultural diversity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and sales strategies in London businesses between 2005 and 2007. London is one of the world's major cities, with a rich cultural diversity that is widely seen as a social and economic asset. Our data allowed us to distinguish owner/partner and wider workforce characteristics, identify migrant/minority‐headed firms, and differentiate firms along multiple dimensions. The results, which are robust to most challenges, suggest a small but significant “diversity bonus” for all types of London firms. First, companies with diverse management are more likely to introduce new product innovations than are those with homogeneous “top teams.” Second, diversity is particularly important for reaching international markets and serving London's cosmopolitan population. Third, migrant status has positive links to entrepreneurship. Overall, the results provide some support for claims that diversity is an economic asset, as well as a social benefit.

  July 02, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12016   open full text
• The Moral Economy Is a Double‐edged Sword: Explaining Farmers’ Earnings and Self‐exploitation in Community‐Supported Agriculture.
  Ryan E. Galt.
  Economic Geography. May 28, 2013
  In this article I develop a political economic understanding of community‐supported agriculture (CSA). I first develop the relevance of three concepts—economic rents, self‐exploitation, and social embeddedness—to CSA and then introduce a framework that relates CSA farmers’ earnings to the average rate of profit, economic rents, and self‐exploitation. I then examine qualitative and quantitative data from a study of 54 CSAs in California's Central Valley and surrounding foothills to explain the wide range of farmers’ earnings in relation to the characteristics of production of CSAs, the social embeddedness of CSAs, and the farmers’ motivations and rationalities. Qualitative data from interviews are used to interpret the results of an ordinary least squares regression analysis showing that (1) farmers’ age, number of employees, and type of CSA strongly shape farmers' earnings; (2) the moral economy of CSA cuts both ways economically, allowing for the capture of economic rents but more often resulting in self‐exploitation because of farmers’ strong sense of obligation to their members; and (3) farmers’ motivations are diverse, but tend toward low and moderate instrumentalism, meaning that earning an income is often not a high priority relative to other values. The conclusion recommends the need to recognize alternative rationalities but also to discuss and confront strong self‐exploitation in alternative food networks because of the broader political economic context in which they exist.

  May 28, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12015   open full text
• The Birth, Death, and Persistence of Firms: Creative Destruction and the Spatial Distribution of U.S. Manufacturing Establishments, 2000–2006.
  Jason P. Brown, Dayton M. Lambert, Raymond J. G. M. Florax.
  Economic Geography. April 05, 2013
  This article deals with the dynamics of the U.S. manufacturing sector, analyzing the birth, death, and ongoing existence of firms in the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction is hypothesized to explain the spatiotemporal dynamics of the distribution of manufacturing establishments. We implemented a partial adjustment model that accounts for spillover effects between counties, unknown forms of heteroskedasticity, and spatial autocorrelation. The steady‐state equilibrium birth and death rates converged to 6.8 percent and 6.1 percent per year, respectively, during the 2000–06 period. We found that firm birth and death were not decisively affected by a creative destruction process during that period, but firm birth and death positively affect the survival (or persistence) rate of single‐unit manufacturing firms.

  April 05, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12014   open full text
• Competitiveness by Design: An Institutionalist Perspective on the Resurgence of a “Mature” Industry in a High‐Wage Economy.
  Carolyn J. Hatch.
  Economic Geography. March 20, 2013
  In the midst of the widespread, long‐term economic downturn throughout the Canadian manufacturing landscape, the contract (or office) furniture sector has demonstrated resilience and vibrancy. The study reported here investigated the institutional foundations of innovation and competitive advantage in this dynamic, design‐led, export‐oriented manufacturing sector. It connects to ongoing work in economic geography and the social sciences to enhance economic geographers' understanding of the role of institutions in shaping the practices of firms and competitive outcomes and seeks to advance a more agency‐centered institutionalist economic geography. The study focused on three dimensions of industrial practices: (1) the use of training and investments in technology, (2) the nature of employment relations, and (3) the use of design. The analysis reveals that the most globally competitive firms operating in a Canadian institutional context prosper by learning a set of production practices and the value of design‐intensive products from the embodied knowledge of their founders, who have lived, studied and worked in high‐wage, coordinated market economies of continental Europe. The ability of these entrepreneurs to transfer industrial knowledge from continental Europe to Canada has had direct benefits for learning and innovation processes that are critical to the synthetic knowledge base of this sector. The empirical analysis entails a sector wide survey questionnaire (N = 220) as well as 55 in‐depth interviews with senior managers, production workers, and designers from a subset of leading firms.

  March 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12009   open full text
• The In Situ Upgrading of Japanese Electronics Firms in Malaysian Industrial Clusters.
  David Edgington, Roger Hayter.
  Economic Geography. March 07, 2013
  The ability of clusters generated by direct foreign investment (DFI) in emerging economies to generate sustained, value‐added growth is a matter of controversy. This article assesses this debate with reference to the role of Japanese electronics multinational corporations (MNCs) in the development of clusters in Malaysia. Conceptually, we present a typology of DFI‐generated industrial clusters that represent increasing degrees of commitment to local value creation and upgrading. Empirically, we conducted a survey of 10 Japanese firms in Malaysia that examined whether or not their factories increased technological upgrading, increasingly embedded their operations through using local skilled labor and supply firms, and responded positively to national policies and cluster‐governance measures supporting the electronics industry. We found that Japanese firms had clearly moved beyond simple assembly‐based to embedded clustering but had not progressed further to technology‐intensive behavior because of the poor technological environment in Malaysia, as well as Japanese MNCs' strategies that depend on technology from headquarters. Nonetheless, Japanese MNCs were sufficiently embedded in Malaysia to upgrade production to digital consumer products, and semiconductor assembly has flourished, warding off competition from China and low‐cost locations in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. At the end of the study period, Malaysia remained an attractive location for Japanese electronics MNCs.

  March 07, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12007   open full text
• Beyond Market Signals: Negotiating Marketplace Politics and Corporate Responsibilities.
  Trina Hamilton.
  Economic Geography. January 24, 2013
  In the face of stiff resistance to their legislative efforts in national and multilateral arenas, nongovernmental organizations, unions, and others are engaging in marketplace politics to press their social and environmental concerns. While important criticisms of market‐based regulation abound, recent research has suggested that this form of politics is not restricted to simple market signals or a singular market logic, so the question of what drives corporate responsiveness remains. Drawing on a statistical analysis of a large data set of marketplace campaigns and in‐depth interviews with campaign proponents, consultants, and targeted executives, this article proposes a relational framework for understanding marketplace politics, situating campaign strategies in relation to targeted firms' brand vulnerabilities and corporate social responsibility (CSR) “absorptive capacity,” on the one hand, and parallel actions of key intermediaries—including investment advisory firms and pioneering competitors—on the other hand. I argue that it is influential minorities of consumers, investors, and intermediaries—often in dialogue with targeted executives—who create change, rather than majority, arm's length market movements. Overall, this research enhances the multiplicity of recent case studies by identifying common opportunities and barriers for marketplace politics and contributes to the burgeoning literature within economic geography that is redrawing the boundaries of corporate CSR decision making and capacity building.

  January 24, 2013   doi: 10.1111/ecge.12005   open full text