A new pubication is out in REGION with Zhiling Wang and Peter Nijkamp titled Barriers of Culture, Networks, and Language. A direct link can be found here , with the following abstract:
Abstract Along with the increasing pace of globalization, recent decades faced a dramatically increase in international migrant flows as well. Compared to the flows of trade, capital and knowledge, we observe that contemporaneous complex institutional differences, historical backgrounds, and individuals’ diverse socio-demographic characteristics make the migrant workers’ choice of destination arguably much more uncontrollable.
New economic geography model with R Introduction Why some regions have more economic activiy than others depend on a variety of factors, including regions’ endowments, good policy and just sheer luck (oftentimes called path dependency). In the 1990s Paul Krugman constructed a model, the Core-Periphery model, that was able to model all these three elements. This model received quite some positive criticism (including a Nobel price), but still is rather complex in wielding it.
Social Interaction and Crime: An Investigation Using Individual Offender Data in Dutch Neighborhoods conditionally accepted in RESTAT Just heard that my paper Social Interactions and Crime Revisited: An Investigation Using Individual Offender Data in Dutch Neighborhoods written together with Wim Bernasco, Jan Rouwendal and Wouter Steenbeek is conditionally accepted in the Review of Economics and Statistics. Im am rather happy with this result; especially given the fact that we have worked on this for more than 5 years (not consecutively but still).
Factor mobility and welfare For educational purposes we teach in the second year’s course regional and urban economics students the Edgeworth-Bowley box. At first sight the concept is quite simple, but because there are restrictions for the total amount of both labour and capital in both regions or countries, the intuition behind the model and especially the drawing of the box is rather complex. Therefore, I once wrote a straightforward but elaborate LaTeX script invoking the Tikz package.
Drawing the diagram of a stylized version of Krugman’s Increasing Returns and Economic Geography For educational purposes we teach in the second year’s course regional and urban economics a simplified version of Krugman’s model in his paper titled Increasing Returns and Economic Geography. The model we have adopted goes as follows:
We consider a simplified economy with two regions and 1 (million) workers ( $L=1$ ) in total. Region 1 is inhabited by 100,000 farmers (bound to their land so immobile), while in Region 2 there are 200,000 farmers.
With Zhiling Wang and Peter Nijkamp
This study analyses the impact of cultural composition on regional attractiveness from the perspective of international migrant sorting behavior on a European regional NUTS1 level. We use an attitudinal survey to quantify cultural distances between natives and immigrants in the region concerned, and estimate the migrants’ varying preferences for both cultural diversity and cultural distance. To account for regional unobserved heterogeneity, our econometric analysis employs artificial instrumental variables, as developed by Bayer et al.