Zsolt Csáfordi (p) / Epainos Award Candidate

Annie Tubadji

This paper aims to identify the effects of agglomeration economies from firm-level sorting effects of labor flows - new hires with an experience of a more efficient production or in a technologically related industry. I employ CBS Microdata to establish the employee mobility network of firms in the Netherlands in the period 2005-2016, and create variables on labor flows, which are used as explanatory variables in a regression on subsequent firm productivity to quantify productivity spillovers. To address possible endogeneity of labor mobility, wage equations are used to calculate the human capital for each worker, which is then averaged on the firm level to use as a control in the productivity regressions along with more firm-level variables (employment size, assets, lag productivity). The findings reveal that urbanization is positively associated with firm productivity, even when controlling for current productivity. This effect is no longer sustained when human capital and work experience of new hires of a more efficient production company is controlled for. This may point to a mechanism through which urbanization affects productivity spillovers through attracting and selecting skilled workers into the region, who can then learn from each other facilitated by the urban setting. I also find that new hires with related but not identical industry experience (measured in three ways) have the highest impact on firm productivity growth. Comparison with earlier research points towards the generalizability of the productivity gap argument independently of the level of economic development or labor market structures.

Lenka Hasova (p)

Zsolt Csáfordi

Spatial Interaction Models (SIM) have been widely used to model migration, urban commuting, and trade flows. However, SIMs are used to model processes with very typical structure. It is unclear as to whether current methods can adequately account for non-traditional types of network, such as bipartite ones. Furthermore, the models are usually validated by standard predictive measures, that aim to evaluate the predictive performance for each flow in isolation, which does not allow us to evaluate how well the models capture the pattern of flows. Finally, we face a vague explanation of what spatial structure is, how it is conceptualized and incorporated into models. In this work, we explore the concept of spatial structure and draw an inference about its representation in the current modelling framework. We then explore the potential of graph structure measure, specifically PageRank, to provide a general measure of spatial structure, and examine its performance as an alternative measure of accessibility in SIMs. We do this for two different types of networks: unipartite and bipartite, and compare models with standard predictive performance methods as well as comparing their spatial pattern reconstruction. We find that PageRank accounts for changes in both at the local and global scale. It may provide a more useful general measure of spatial structure for typologically different SIMs and can yield estimates that are superior to traditional measures of accessibility. Overall, this work encourages us to think more critically about spatial structure in SIMs and widen our ideas of what constitutes ”good performance”.

Annie Tubadji (p), Simon Rudkin, Cem Özgüzel, Lukas, Klein-Rueschkamp

Lenka Hasova

The concept of cultural gravity was coined by Tubadji and Nijkamp (2015), who define it as the power of a cultural-milieu attraction that a locality exerts over migrants from various cultural backgrounds. The main argument of Tubadji and Nijkamp (2015) is that the cultural milieu of a place has a different appeal for equally skilled migrants from different cultural backgrounds (due to cultural distance), and therefore the locality is inefficient in attracting and extracting the full human capital potential from those groups of migrants, who remain culturally distant. The aim of our paper is to test the validity of this effect of cultural gravity on the spatial clustering and productivity of culturally diverse migrants throughout the European Union. We add to the literature in two ways. First, we clarify the position of the cultural gravity notion within the urban economics literature on moving centers of gravity and frictions in the redistribution of economic growth. Second, we use spatial regression methods, and topological data analysis approaches to quantify the relationship between cultural gravity and economic gravity in the EU28 regions. Our findings concord with earlier literature on cultural gravity and advance this literature by geographically mapping the invisible and non-linear cultural friction in the redistribution of growth across the EU regions. Thus, we show how cultural gravity exerts an important impact on the cohesion process in Europe.