Martin Falk (p), Eva Hagsten (p)

Jun Oshiro

The aim of this study is to provide new empirical insights into what attracts congress and conventions meetings to European cities. In order to determine the factors explaining the probability that a city is a convention location and if so the number of meetings we use zero inflated count data models. The sample covers 920 cities in Europe of which 196 hosts 5 or more meetings. Estimations reveal that presence of UNESCO world heritage sites, past European Capital of culture assignment, other cultural offerings (operas), presence of highly ranked university, population and being the capital city are factors of importance for the probability and number of conventions. Presence of an airport, climate zone, having a sea border, past foreign direct investment in accommodation are also significant but considerably less pertinent in terms of magnitude. In addition, the general price level seems to lack relevance.

Helena Nilsson (p), Johan Klaesson

Martin Falk

See extended abstract

Jun Oshiro (p), Yasuhiro Sato

Helena Nilsson

We develop a multisector general equilibrium model of a system of cities to study the quantitative significance of industrial structure in determining spatial structure. We first identify three types of wedges that capture the extent to which the standard urban economic model fails to explain empirically: efficiency and labor wedges, and amenity. We then calibrate the model to Japanese regional data and run counterfactual exercises to identify the significance of each wedge in each sector. Our analysis shows that (i) the labor wedge plays the primary role in determining the spatial structure, and (ii) the secondary sector is the most influential.