Dario Musolino (p)

Territorial attractiveness is an increasingly relevant issue for regional economic development. Mobility and attractiveness of firms, investments, tourists, talented people, students, creative people, etc. is an extremely important phenomenon, since the growing interconnection between countries and regions results in a considerable increase in relations and flows, not only of goods and services, but also of investments and people.
Many studies have been conducted on territorial attractiveness, although they are not so many as in the case of territorial competiveness, which is a close but different phenomenon. The impression is that the former, differently from the latter, yet lacks a clear conceptualisation and definition. Territorial competiveness is a question which evidently has been investigated and studied much more in depth than the territorial attractiveness in the regional sciences. Therefore, there was a long discussion on its sense and its meaning.
It is also true that territorial attractiveness is a complex, multimensional, and multifaceted concept and it involves phenomena with a different nature (flows of financial resources, people, firms, human capital, etc.). However, for all these reasons it probably requires to be discussed and better defined.
In this paper I therefore seek to address and discuss this concept, taking into consideration the literature so far produced. I will try to explain why terrotial attractiveness is such a relevant issue, why it needs to be better conceptualised and defined, what aspects are still unclear and confused, and which are the differences and the similiarities with close concepts. like territorial competitiveness. And then I discuss a possible definition.

Bibliographic references
Annoni P. e Dijkstra L. (2013), EU Regional Competitiveness Index. RCI 2013, JRC Scientific and Policy Reports, Luxembourg, EU Publications Office.
Meester, W.J. (2004), Locational preferences of entrepreneurs: stated preferences in The Netherlands and Germany. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag.
Musolino D. (2015), Stated locational preferences of entrepreneurs in Italy. The patterns, the characteristics and the explanatory factors of the Italian entrepreneurs’ mental maps. Thesis (PhD), University of Groningen.
Musolino D., Volget S. (2018), A Multi-dimensional Approach to the Measurement of Territorial Attractiveness: Towards a Synthetic Indicator, WP No 1/2018, CERTeT Bocconi University.
Rizzi P., Pianta R. (2012), Attrattività, cultura e sviluppo locale, paper presentato alla XXXIII Conferenza AISRE, 13-15 settembre, Roma.
Servillo L., Atkinson R., Russo A.P. (2012), Territorial attractiveness in EU urban and spatial policy: a critical review and future research agenda, in “European urban and regional studies”, vol. 19 issue 4, pp. 349-365.

Karima Kourtit , John Östh (p), Peter Nijkamp

This paper offers a novel contribution to the assessment of attractive features or perceived qualities of cities or urban neighbourhoods, based on a quantitative evaluation of these areas by introducing and applying the concept of ‘city-love’ analysis. Next to a concise overview of related and complementary notions (e.g., happiness, satisfaction, well-being, quality of life, contentment), we propose a new departure for attractiveness research of residents or users of cities by introducing the notion of a ‘city-love production function’, which expresses the ability of cities to enhance the love or appreciation for a city through an appropriate combination of specific ‘city capital’ constituents. The framework will be applied to extensive multivariate data on municipalities in Sweden. The results are next compared with ‘big data’ expressions on the appreciation of cities – and their characteristics – taken from cell phone information and social media platforms.

Daniela Bragoli (p), Giulio Cainelli, Flavia Cortelezzi, Giovanni Marseguerra

The aim of this article is to study the link between financial vulnerability and industrial district affiliation in Italy. In particular, we focus on whether the relation has changed during the years of the recent financial crisis, which saw a large credit contraction and weaker firms’ financial conditions.
A lot of effort has been put in the industrial district literature in analyzing the impact of agglomeration economies on innovation and growth, finding a positive relation between the two (Comba et al., 2000; Cingano et al., 2004; Boschma et al., 2007, Frenken et al. 2007). On one side, sectoral specialization boosts productivity, since firms belonging to the district are expected to learn mainly from other local firms in the same industry and, on the other, local productive variety enhances the local and regional development, because firms get new and better ideas through other local firms that are active in different industries. Thus, the survival of a firm increases because of the existence of a production channel (Martin, 2011).
The novelty of this paper is to test whether the production channel studied in the literature not only makes the firms more productive, but also more financial healthy.
We analyze this issue measuring the impact of industrial district firm membership on its financial vulnerability. We use the Whited Wu (2006) index, a proxy of financial vulnerability which is widely used in the empirical finance literature. The index, based on a standard inter-temporal investment model augmented to account for financial frictions, is constructed with balance sheet observed variables such as Cash Flow, Leverage, Dividends, Total Assets, and the differential between the sectoral growth and the firms’ growth, which is a proxy of growth opportunity.
We construct a dataset of 539801 Italian manufacturing firms over the period 2006-2016 and we estimate a panel fixed effect model accounting for the potential endogeneity of industrial district membership.
Our preliminary results demonstrate that the localization of a firm in an industrial district is positively related to our indicators of financial health. Thus, agglomeration economies have a role in determining the financial position of a firm.
The implications of the article have relevant prescriptions for regional planners and individual entrepreneurs. If the location of a firm in an industrial district is a determinant of financial health, then government and local policy concerned with firm and growth need to target local production system.

Julia Sonnenburg (p)

Municipal mergers are central to policy discussions and reforms in many countries. For instance, the number of municipalities has dropped considerably in Germany from 16,100 in 1991 to 11,100 in 2017. The primary argument for municipal mergers is that larger units realize economies of scale in public service provision. A large strand of literature analyzes the implications of mergers for the cost of public service provision and finds mixed results for potential improvements in technical efficiency. This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the effect of municipal mergers on the provision of public services such as available kindergarten places using rich data from administrative registers in Germany. We make the hypothesis that absorbed municipalities provide less public kindergarten places after the reform. Moreover, we expect that these changes in local public good provision could lead to more inequalities between urban and rural areas.

Municipal mergers typically result in a spatial re-organization of municipal economic activities. A merger might increase the distance to the "relevant" economic and social center of a municipality, because of the usage of common social services and the realization of economy of scale effects. With an increasing distance, the location incentives of reforms within a municipality may also change. Despite its relevance, these consequences of municipal mergers are unexplored in existing literature. In our paper, we focus on the provision of available kindergarten places. Recent research demonstrates that the effects of early childhood education persist over a lifetime. Hence, Education is, one of the most important services, and it is, albeit partially, publicly provided in almost all developed countries.

In order to provide credible evidence, we exploit large-scale municipal border reforms that took place in the German State of Saxony between 2002 and 2016 using administrative data on the kindergarten level with more than 24,000 observations. The dataset provides both information on whether the kindergarten is allocated in a municipality that absorbs or is being absorbed in the merger process and whether the kindergarten is publicly or privately financed. Using a triple difference-in-differences approach, we expect to find out that municipalities being absorbed experience a decrease in public kindergarten places; while the number of private provided kindergarten places should remain unchanged or increase. Additionally, we hypothesize that merging municipalities experience a concentration of public services leading to major inequalities between urban and rural areas. These results could indicate that administrative border reforms reinforce regional inequality.