# 21.14 “Airbnb in the City” : assessing short-term rental regulation in Bordeaux

Calum Robertson, Sylvain Dejean & Raphaël Suire

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Short-term rental platforms, led by Airbnb, have disrupted the tourism accommodation industry over the last decade. This disruption has sometimes come along with unwanted long lasting effects on the urban dynamics of cities, and it has encouraged policy-makers to intervene. However, little is known about how effective such interventions are. This paper empirically evaluates the impact Bordeaux’s regulation has had on STR activity through both a Differences-in-differences and a spatial discontinuity design. We find that regulation has had a reductive effect of over 316 rented days per month per district on average. This equates to over half of a pre-regulation standard deviation and 27 thousand nights spent per month in STRs across the city. However, the city’s attempts to limit activity stemming from commercial listings yields mixed results as compliant home-sharing listings also seem to have modified their behaviour. Additionally, analysis at the city border points towards the existence of potential spillover effects on the suburbs, further paving the way for discussion about the effectiveness of one-size-fits-all STR policy design.

# 21.13 The role of non-local linkages for innovation

Ron Boschma

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Non-local linkages are considered to be crucial for innovation in regions because they provide access to new knowledge and ideas. This helps places to avoid or overcome lock-in situations. The cluster literature has focused on gatekeepers that may diffuse non-local knowledge to cluster firms. In the global city literature, this gatekeeping role is taken up by multinational enterprises and knowledge-intensive-business-services. However, little attention has yet been focused on the nature of these non-local linkages. Not all non-linkages matter for the capacity of a region to innovate. What matters in particular is the extent to which types of knowledge that flow through non-local linkages are complementary to the local knowledge base. What matters is not being connected to other regions per se, but being linked to regions that give access to complementary capabilities. Also inflows of external agents are crucial for regional innovation, especially for more radical innovations.

# 21.12 Does a local knowledge base in Industry 3.0 foster diversification in Industry 4.0 technologies? Evidence from European regions

Matteo Laffi & Ron Boschma

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The aim of the paper is to shed light on the role played by regional knowledge bases in Industry 3.0 in fostering new technologies in Industry 4.0 in European regions (NUTS3) over the period 1991-2015. We find that 4.0 technologies appear to be quite related to 3.0 technologies, with some heterogeneity among different technology fields. The paper investigates the geographical implications. We find that the probability of developing Industry 4.0 technologies is higher in regions that are specialised in Industry 3.0 technologies. However, other types of knowledge bases also sustain regional diversification in Industry 4.0 technologies.

# 21.11 Industrial Relatedness in MNE Spillovers over Geographical Space

Nicola Cortinovis, Zhiling Wang & Hengky Kurniawan

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In this paper, we explore how spillovers from multinational enterprises (MNEs) spread and impact domestic firms through different channels and at various spatial scales. Taking a firm-level approach, we test whether industrial relatedness mediates spillover effects from MNEs over and above horizontal and vertical linkages traditionally identified by the literature. Thanks to fine- grained geographical information, we further investigate the spatial reach of the spillovers and how they are associated with domestic firms’ characteristics such as absorptive capacity and technological sophistication. Our hypotheses are tested on a panel data set of Indonesian manufacturing firms census between 2002 to 2009. We find that domestic firms have higher total factor productivity when being exposed to a higher share of output from multinational firms in related industries, on top of the widely acknowledged horizontal and vertical MNE spillovers. We also show that MNE spillovers are sensitive to distance, with relatedness-mediated ones being detected between 30 and 60 km from the municipality of the MNE. Regarding heterogeneity, large firms benefit from productivity-enhancing relatedness spillovers at a wider spatial distance (up to 90km), and firms in less-advanced industries benefit from relatedness mediated effects as much as those in more advanced industries.

# 21.10 The geography of innovation and technology news – An empirical study of the German news media

Burcu Ozgun & Tom Broekel

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Variations in the frequency and tone of news media are the focus of a growing literature. However, to date, empirical investigations have primarily confirmed the existence of such differences at the country level. This paper extends those insights to the subnational level. We provide theoretical arguments and empirical support for systematic regional variations in the frequency and sentiments of news related to innovation and new technologies. These variations reflect regional socio-economic structures. We find that the average newspaper circulating in urban areas features more news on innovation and new technologies than media in more rural areas. Similar endings hold for locations in East Germany and to a certain degree for regions with low unemployment. The sentiments of innovation and new technology news are negatively associated to the unemployment rate, and they tend to be lower in regional newspapers than in national ones. Overall, our results suggest a strong link between the regional socioeconomic conditions and how newspapers circulating in these places report on innovation and new technologies.

# 21.09 Administrative reforms, urban hierarchy, and local population growth. Lessons from Italian unification

Giulio Cainelli, Carlo Ciccarelli & Roberto Ganau

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We analyze the local-level demographic effects of the 1865 Italian “Lanza administrative reform”. This reform established the skeleton and functioning of the entire public administration in the Kingdom of Italy, unified in 1861, by re-assigning administrative functions to municipalities throughout the country. We focus on municipality-level population dynamics over the period 1861-2011, while also providing evidence of more recent local-level economic performance. We rely on ‘generalized’ difference-in-differences and matching techniques, and find that municipalities that emerged from the reform with new or increased administrative functions at supra-municipal level gained a population growth premium, persistent over time. Moreover, local labor market productivity increased during the early 2000s.

# 21.08 Social capital and economic growth in the regions of Europe

Jonathan Muringani, Rune Dahl Fitjar and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

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Social capital is an important factor explaining differences in economic growth among regions. However, the key distinction between bonding social capital, which can lead to lock-in and myopia, and bridging social capital, which promotes knowledge flows across diverse groups, has been overlooked in growth research. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by examining how bonding and bridging social capital affect regional economic growth, using data for 190 regions in 21 EU countries, covering eight waves of the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2016. The findings confirm that bridging social capital is linked to higher levels of regional economic growth. Bonding social capital is highly correlated with bridging social capital and associated with lower growth when this is controlled for. We do not find significantly different effects of bonding social capital in regions with more or less bridging social capital, or vice versa. We examine the interaction between social and human capital, finding that bridging social capital is fundamental for stimulating economic growth, especially in low-skilled regions. Human capital also moderates the relationship between bonding social capital and growth, reducing the negative externalities imposed by excessive bonding.

# 21.07 Institutions and the Productivity Challenge for European Regions

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose & Roberto Ganau

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Europe has witnessed a considerable labour productivity slowdown in recent decades. Many potential explanations have been proposed to address this productivity ‘puzzle’. However, how the quality of local institutions influences labour productivity has been overlooked by the literature. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating how institutional quality affects labour productivity growth and, particularly, its determinants at the regional level during the period 2003-2015. The results indicate that institutional quality influences regions’ labour productivity growth both directly —as improvements in institutional quality drive productivity growth— and indirectly —as the short- and long-run returns of human capital and innovation on labour productivity growth are affected by regional variations in institutional quality.

# 21.06 Does urban concentration matter for changes in country economic performance?

Roberto Ganau & Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

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This paper uses a novel, globally-harmonised city-level dataset —with cities defined at the Functional Urban Area (FUA) level— to revisit the link between urban concentration and country-level economic dynamics. The empirical analysis, involving 108 low- and high-income countries, examines how differences in urban concentration impinge on changes in employment, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, and labour productivity at country level over the period 2000-2016. The results indicate that urban concentration reduces employment growth but increases GDP per capita and labour productivity growth. The returns of urban concentration are higher for high- than for low-income countries and are mainly driven by the ‘core’ of FUAs, rather than by sub-urban areas.

# 21.05 The Overlooked Insights from Correlation Structures in Economic Geography

Matias Nehuen Iglesias

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Measures of cooccurrence computed from cross sectional data are used to rationalize connections among economic activities. In this work we show the grounds for unifying a multiplicity of similarity techniques applied in the literature and we precise the identification of cooccurrence to actual coexistence in space, when one side of the cross section are small administrative areas. All the similarity techniques studied here are akin to a correlation structure computed from spatial intensity, also known as locational correlation. We argue that these correlations offer objective tools to detect spatial patterns. Indeed we show that when applied to data of employment by industry and county in United States (from 2002-7) the communities of networks derived from locational correlations detect spatial patterns long acknowledged in economic geography. By addressing critical open issues on the interpretation of cooccurrence indices, this work o↵ers technical guides for their exploitation in Economic Geography studies.