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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether competitor concentration relates to better customer acceptance of the firm’s offerings and better networking of the firm with competitors and government officials.

The research is conducted in the context of the transition economy of Vietnam, using a combination of methods. Qualitative interviews are followed by a survey of 199 small firms in Hanoi, Vietnam. Since competitor concentration is count data, Poisson regression is used to test the relationship between networking, customer acceptance, and competitor concentration.

The results show that locating in a competitor concentration area improves customer acceptance of the firm’s offerings and increases networking with competitors, while decreasing networking with government officials. Competitor concentration does not help improve firm performance.

A sample of 199 businesses in the food, furniture, and jewelry sectors in Hanoi may not be representative of all private businesses in Vietnam. The use of cross-sectional data could not establish causational relationships among variables.

Small firms in transition economies should be aware of the trade-offs between initial customer acceptance and negative consequences of being in a competitor concentrated area. Thus, once the firm’s offerings are generally accepted by customers, the firm may consider moving out of competitor concentration areas to expand and differentiate.

This paper points out that in the absence of effective market institutions, businesses want to be located near a concentration of similar firms as a means of gaining initial customer acceptance. This initial acceptance does not necessarily help firms improve business performance beyond the firm’s survival.

This research aims to empirically analyze the spatial bank branch network in Canada. The authors study the market structure (both industrial and geographic concentrations) via its own or adjacent postal areas. The empirical framework of this study considers branch density (the ratio of the total number of branches to area size) by employing a spatial two-way fixed effects model. The main finding of this study is that there are no effects associated with market structure, however, there are strong spatial within and nearby effects associated with the socioeconomic variables. In addition, the authors also study the effect of spatial competition from rival banks: they find that large banks and small banks tend to avoid markets dominated by their competitors.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize how the industry life cycle unfolds differently across places and how economic agglomeration varies over time.

The paper relies on literature review and conceptual analysis.

It generates a dynamic geographic concentration model (i.e. an industry’s degree of geographic concentration drops in the growth stage, rises in the mature stage, and drops again in the new growth stage) and a localized industry life-cycle model (i.e. temporal dynamics differ between the center and the periphery).

It makes contribution by theorizing that the extent to which an industry is geographically concentrated changes over time, and by demonstrating how an industry’s center and periphery may experience different temporal dynamics.

This paper aims to analyse the recent changes to the Pillar 2 regulatory-prescribed methodologies to classify and calculate credit concentration risk. Focussing on the Prudential Regulation Authority’s (PRA) methodologies, the paper tests the susceptibility to bias of the Herfindahl–Hirscham Index (HHI). The empirical tests serve to assess the assumption that the regulatory classification of exposures within the geographical concentration is subject to potential misuse that would undermine the PRA’s objective of obtaining risk sensitivity and improved banking competition.

Using the credit exposure data from three global banks, the HHI methodology is applied to the portfolio of geographically classified exposures, replicating the regulatory exercise of reporting credit concentration risk under Pillar 2. In doing so, the validity of the aforementioned assumption is tested by simulating the PRA’s Pillar 2 regulatory submission exercise with different scenarios, under which the credit exposures are assigned to different geographical regions.

The paper empirically shows that changing the geographical mapping of the Eastern European EU member states can result in a substantial reduction of the Pillar 2 credit concentration risk capital add-on. These empirical findings hold only for the banks with large exposures to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The paper reports no material impact for the well-diversified credit portfolios of global banks.

This paper reviews the PRA-prescribed methodologies and the Pillar 2 regulatory guidance for calculating the capital add-on for the single name, sector and geographical credit concentration risk. In doing so, this paper becomes the first to test the assumptions that the regulatory guidance around the geographical breakdown of credit exposures is subject to potential abuse because of the ambiguity of the regulations.

The issue of export instability exerts an enduring fascination for economists with an interest in the area of economic development. Over several decades a voluminous literature has emerged embracing debates on the domestic consequences and on the causes of export instability. The purpose here is to examine these debates and an attempt is made to set out different theoretical stances, to classify and examine empirical findings, and to indicate the directions in which the debates have moved. Such a statement of a review article's purpose is, of course, incomplete without more specific delineation of the boundaries within which the general objectives are pursued. Here that delineation has three facets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the substitutability of corporate hedging and diversification in the real estate investment trusts (REITs) industry. The authors hypothesize that, relative to diversified firms, focused firms are more likely to be associated with hedging. The role of firm size is also analyzed.

The logistic regression approach is utilized to analyze the probability of hedging and the panel regression approach is used to examine the amount of hedging.

The authors find that, relative to diversified firms, firms focused on a single property type are more likely to engage in hedging. However, this finding is significant only for smaller firms, which implies a non-linear relation between hedging and firm size. The evidence is not as strong when firm focus is measured by geographic concentration. In terms of hedging amount, smaller firms’ average hedge ratio is greater than that of larger firms. For either small or large firms group, hedging amounts increase with firm focus measured by either property or geographic concentration and increase with firm sizes.

The results imply that, relative to diversified REITs, REITs focused on a single property type are more likely to engage in hedging. However, this finding is significant only for smaller firms, which implies a non-linear relation between hedging and firm size. The evidence is not as strong when firm focus is measured by geographic concentration, suggesting that geographic concentration is perceived to be less risky than property type concentration. For either small or large firms group, hedging amounts increase with firm focus measured by either property or geographic concentration and increase with firm sizes, which implies that hedging amount does not depend on firm size. The sample period is limited to the years 2010 to 2013 because some data needs to be manually collected.

The results imply that REITs consider both property diversification and hedging in managing their risk.

The research represents an early attempt to investigate the relation between corporate hedging and diversification. The investigation into the REIT industry has several advantages such as a lower likelihood of using derivatives for speculation.

This chapter proposes a refined and updated measurement of the World's Economic Center of Gravity over the 1950–2008 period, based on historical data provided by Maddison (2010) and on the detailed grid data of the G-Econ (Nordhaus, 2006) database. The economic center of gravity is located in the vicinity of Iceland during the first three decades, and then heads strongly toward the East since 1980. Regarding geographic concentration, world production is less concentrated than population across the Earth's surface, and becomes even less so over time. A new decomposition technique is proposed, which suggests a structural break at the end of the 1970s. Measures of R&D activity, education expenditures and literacy as growth related indicators depict a spatial pattern that is consistent with the Eastern shift of the world economic center of gravity.

Airports and urban developments in their vicinity constitute a highly specialized type of agglomeration based on air connectivity that epitomizes the importance of mobility in the modern service economy. However, in a frictionless world of backyard capitalism and perfect competition, such agglomeration of civil aviation services would not have been necessary. Thus, concepts such as imperfect markets, path dependence, and cumulative causation may be alternatively used to explain the spatial aspects of airport developments. Focusing on “second-nature” concentration, the “new geographical economics” (NGE) literature offers a potential theoretical framework that organizes these concepts into a coherent economic framework. This chapter aims to highlight the unique relevance of the NGE approach in developing an economics-based understanding of the spatial distribution of airports. Drawing from the existing NGE knowledge-base, this conceptual chapter explains that the NGE approach can be adopted as a micro-foundation to show how the spatial aspects of airport development, including core-periphery dynamics of regional disparity and parity, can emerge from economic mechanisms. The chapter concludes with potential implications for airport economics and regional policy, along with the discussion of some of the main critiques of the theory.

This paper examines the determinants of the initial location choices of immigrants who enter the U.S. with different kinds of visas (“green cards”). Conditional logit models with the 48 contiguous U.S. states as the choice set are estimated using population data on immigrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service between 1971 and 2000 matched to data on state characteristics from the Integrated Public Use Microsamples of the U.S. Census. As in previous research, it is estimated that immigrants have a higher probability of moving to states where individuals from their region of birth are a larger share of the state population, with relatives of legal permanent residents responding most to this factor. In addition, it is estimated that immigrants in all admission categories respond to labor market conditions when choosing where to live, but that these effects are the largest for male employment-based immigrants and, surprisingly, refugees. These relationships are relatively stable across models that include state fixed effects as well as those that allow the coefficients to vary across the four decades available in the data.

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of the formation of industrial clusters on the obtainment of professional human resources, to verify the impact of human resources on clustering relationships and firm’s performance and to understand whether the formation of clusters can contribute to the obtainment of professional human resources and the improvement of competitiveness of enterprises. It was expected that solutions could be found to make new contributions through the verification of special economic zones (SEZs).

Using manufacturers in Taiwan’s SEZs as the subjects, this study explored the impact on the obtainment of professional human resources after the formation of industrial clusters in SEZs, through conducting and empirical study with a questionnaire survey.

The professional human resources are the essential factor for the formation of industrial clusters and the improvement of competitiveness. This study also confirmed that industries can have professional human resources by industrial clustering and that this will produce a positive impact on the enterprise clustering relationships, which can also have a positive impact on firm’s performance and can enhance the enterprise’s competitive advantage.

Industrial clustering is the key factor to attract professional human resources; industrial clusters can enhance firm’s performance; and professional human resources affect firm’s performance of enterprises.

No study has discussed the topic of clusters from the perspective of SEZs also including six export processing zone (EPZ) parks in Taiwan. This study discussed the topic using theories relating to clustering and human resources. The formation of industrial clusters can result in higher competitiveness in the face of the global market. The EPZ industrial cluster provides an excellent investment environment. Coupled with one-stop express services and geographic advantage, the land-use rate is up to 97 per cent and the per hectare output value amounts to NTD 3.2 billion, setting a successful example of an industrial cluster.