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This study aims to elucidate the quantitative and qualitative differences in employment development between German districts. Building on ideas from competitive development and resource-based theory, the paper particularly seeks to explain enduring East-West differences between rural regions by two different forms of competitive advantage: cost leadership and quality differentiation.

This study follows a two-step empirical approach: First, an extended shift-share regression is conducted to analyze employment development in Western and Eastern German districts between 2007 and 2016. Second, the competitive share effect and other individual terms of the shift-share model are further examined in additional regressions using regional economic characteristics as exogenous variables.

The findings suggest that the above-average employment growth of the rural districts in the West is owed to the successful exploitation of experience in manufacturing that has been gathered by firms in the past 100 years or so. While their strategy is largely based on advanced and specialized resources and an innovation-driven differentiation strategy, the relatively weak employment development of Eastern rural districts might be explained by a lack of comparable long-term experiences and the related need to focus on the exploitation of basic and general resources and, accordingly, on the efficiency-based strategy of cost leadership.

This study offers an in-depth empirical analysis of how the competitive share effect, i.e. region-specific resources beyond industry structure, contributes to regional employment development. The analysis reveals that quantitative differences in rural employment development are closely related to qualitatively different levels of input factors and different regimes of competitiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the effects of innovation, specialisation, qualifications and sectoral structure on the resilience of German regions (municipal level) facing the Great Recession in 2008/2009.

To calculate the effects of various variables on the resilience of German regions against the Great Recession, the authors use quantile regressions. To measure resilience, the authors create a number of indexes representing different parts of the economy: resistance performance index, recovery performance index, shift-share resistance index, shift-share recovery index, manufacturing resistance index, manufacturing recovery index, service resistance index and service recovery index.

The results of this study confirm that locations with employment growth before the crisis and with a good industry structure show better employment dynamics during and after the crisis. The authors find evidence for positive relationship between innovativeness, qualification, the share of the service sector, specialisation and resistance. The authors obtain positive results for related variety and both resistance and recovery. The share of the manufacturing sector only shows a positive relationship with recovery.

The authors expand the existing literature in three aspects: First, instead of using regions as observation units, the authors conduct the analyses on the basis of municipalities and their surroundings. By doing so, the authors reduce the modifiable area unit problem because the authors do not rely on regions defined for administrative reasons. Second, the authors apply quantile regressions to detect nonlinear effects. Third, in addition to the resilience of the whole economy, the authors also study the resilience of the manufacturing and service sectors separately and examine the resilience of the local shift effect.

Aims to provide new evidence about gender differentials in domestic work time, market work time and total work time, that updates the evidence provided by Jenkins and O'Leary in 1997 and Layte in 1999 using UK time‐budget surveys.

Investigates gender differentials in work times using the British Household Panel survey (BHPS). The BHPS is a nationally representative longitudinal data set consisting of some 5,500 households (and 10,000 individuals) first interviewed in the autumn of 1991 and followed and re‐interviewed every year subsequently.

The picture that emerges from the BHPS data is a rather “traditional” and well‐known one. On average, women (be them married or single) work more at home and less in the labour market than men. The comforting side of this pessimistic conclusion, is that the trends in domestic and paid work time over the 1990s show a narrowing in the gender differentials, thanks mainly to the changing behaviour of women and not of men.

An important message that seems to emerge is that women are far more flexible than men. That is, men hardly react or change their behaviour in front of (certain) situations that clearly affect women's time allocation decisions (e.g. presence of children, cohort effects). Finally, the paper identifies and characterises the men who do better at home in relative terms: the “new” men.

This paper aims to study the connection between the systematic equity risk of US tourism industry companies and a set of information from inside these firms and the market. The authors sought to identify which information explains equity risk to estimate patterns of behavior – especially for those companies that cannot have a beta – in terms of the cost of share capital.

To carry out the research, the authors used a panel data technique and combined accounting information from the selected companies with macroeconomic information to develop independent variables. The sample consisted of 79 firms of the arts, entertainment and recreation and accommodation and food services sectors in the USA for 2004-2013. The authors incorporated two dummy variables into the analyses. The first one was used to find out if a difference exists between the two sectors, and the other was used to examine differences before and after 2008, when the current economic and financial crisis began.

The results reveal that equity risk is explained by businesses’ size and growth, along with three indicators of business efficiency, consumer price and Stoxx Europe 50 indices. The 2008 financial crisis did not alter the behavior of the estimated model, and no difference was found between the two sectors in question.

The study’s most important limitation is the number of companies and years that make up the sample, although a broader set of data was analyzed in this work compared to previous studies.

The research results are quite useful to tourism enterprise management in the US market as they provide information that explains companies’ equity risk. Knowing this information could facilitate more efficient management, and an understanding of which information determines company risk can help to quantify risk objectively without access to betas.

The authors studied the US market as an important financial market and the tourist industry, in particular, for its economic significance, as shown by the direct contribution of travel and tourism to the US gross domestic product. Although this type of research in the tourism sector is not new, the present study answers the need identified by Park and Jang (2014) to continue this line of research by using a more interdisciplinary approach that combines hospitality research with finance and/or accounting studies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the causal impact of international immigration inflows on housing prices at the state level in Malaysia from 2007 to 2018.

Hedonic regressions using both fixed effects and first difference approaches are used to estimate the impact of immigration inflows on house prices in Malaysia. This study deals with potential endogeneity of immigrants’ choices of destination states in Malaysia by using a shift-share instrument variable approach. Specifically, historical shares of immigrants in a state are used to predict current immigrant inflows to a particular state. The predicted value of immigration flows is then inserted into the house price regression models in place of the actual immigration flows.

Using annual data for 14 states from 2007 to 2018, this study documents the positive impact of immigration inflows on house prices in Malaysia. The authors find that a 1% increase in immigration inflows is associated with an increase of 10.2% (first difference) and 13.4% (fixed effects) in house prices. The economic impact is larger in magnitude than that found in developed countries. Contrary to existing studies that find immigration inflows to be associated with native flight, the authors find support for the attraction effects hypothesis, where immigration inflow is positive and significantly related to net native flows.

The effects of immigration inflows are economically significant, considering that the effects are 10 times larger than those documented in the USA. Policymakers in Malaysia ought to monitor house price trends in immigrant-popular states to ensure that natives are not priced out by new immigrants.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is perhaps the first study to focus on the relationship between immigration inflows and house prices in Malaysia. Focusing on Malaysia has at least two originality aspects. First, Malaysia is relatively not an immigrant-popular destination. Second, Malaysia has a multiracial and heterogenous society among its natives. The findings, obtained within these two settings, would therefore provide a wider scope of result generalization, and natural experiment grounds for causal implications of our results.

In this paper I investigate the nature of the differential in poverty by ethnicity in rural China using data from the Chinese Household Income Project in 2002. For that, I compare observed poverty with that in a counterfactual distribution in which ethnic minorities are given a set of relevant village and household characteristics of the Han majority. In particular, I investigate the importance of the location of minorities in explaining their higher poverty levels. The ethnic poverty differential does not change after equalizing the distribution of the population by geographical region (unless we use a higher poverty line). However, it is reduced after equalizing other locational characteristics of minorities (such as them living in less developed and mountainous areas), their larger number of children, their low education, and their fewer skilled non-agriculture workers. Finally, the ethnic per capita (log) income differential is shown to be higher for higher percentiles, with an increasing role of the geographical region as the main driver of these higher differentials.

This chapter uses quarterly county-level data from 2006 to 2014 to examine the direction of causality in the relationship between per capita opioid prescription rates and employment-to-population ratios. We first estimate models of the effect of per capita opioid prescription rates on employment-to-population ratios, instrumenting opioid prescriptions for younger ages using opioid prescriptions to the elderly. We find that the estimated effect of opioids on employment-to-population ratios is positive but small for women, while there is no relationship for men. We then estimate models of the effect of employment-to-population ratios on opioid prescription rates using a shift-share instrument and find ambiguous results. Overall, our findings suggest that there is no simple causal relationship between economic conditions and the abuse of opioids. Therefore, while improving economic conditions in depressed areas is desirable for many reasons, it is unlikely on its own to curb the opioid epidemic.

Two hypotheses concerning two variables that potentially influence the “add/drop” foreign market decisions of U.S. exporters of sewing machines are developed and empirically tested. The variables are import market potential, and a surrogate measure of import market competitiveness. A third variable, concerning a developing country’s “trade regime” – Import Substituting, Export Promoting (Bhagwati, 1978) – is employed as a control variable in the tests. The two hypotheses are confirmed, and the results shed light on how U.S. exporters of sewing machines should analyze data on the three variables en route to adjusting their respective portfolios of export markets in a context of making add/drop foreign market decisions. The results of the research potentially contribute to three different literatures: the international marketing literature, the competitiveness literature and the “trade regime” literature in international economics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the developments in final electricity consumption, estimate the portions of changes that can be attributed to national, sectoral or regional factors, and to investigate determinants of the regional component (RC) in Croatia at the subnational level in the period 2001-2013.

In the first stage, the dynamic shift-share method is used to decompose final electricity consumption, and then, in the second stage, the panel population-averaged logit model is conducted to find the main determinants of the extracted RC.

The results show that both the sectoral factor and the regional factor are responsible for an increase in electricity consumption over the period considered, whereby the regional specificities had a larger impact in general. Thereby, the most developed regions, including the tourism-oriented ones, exhibited the largest average increase in electricity consumption mainly due to positive effects of the regional-specific factors, while the negative effects of these factors were mainly responsible for low average rates of changes in electricity consumption in less developed regions.

The results suggest that regional-specific energy conservation programs might be more effective in improving energy efficiency than the sector-oriented ones, as well as that socio-economic and contextual determinants matter when it comes to the probability of having a positive regional effect on the electricity consumption rate.

The paper investigated the determinants of the extracted RC which has not yet been addressed in the energy economics literature.

Long lease real estate funds (over £15bn in Q3 2020) have emerged as an increasingly important part of UK pension fund real estate portfolios. This paper explores the reasons for their dramatic growth, their characteristics and performance.

This study uses data for the period 2004–2020 collected directly from fund managers and from AREF/MSCI and empirical analysis to explore their characteristics and performance.

Pension fund de-risking and regulatory guidance have supported the dramatic growth of long lease real estate funds. Long lease real estate funds have delivered strong risk-adjusted returns relative to both balanced property funds (with shorter lease terms) and the wider property market. This relative performance has been particularly strong when wider property market performance has been weak. Long lease funds have objectives aligned with liability matching and their performance suggests they are lower risk (more bond-like) investments. In addition, our analysis highlights they are far less responsive to the wider property market than balanced funds. However, they are not significantly different from balanced property funds in terms of their short-term relationship with gilt yield movements.

For pension funds and other investors the paper highlights that long lease real estate funds offer a different exposure than balanced property funds. Long lease funds have objectives more closely aligned to the overall objectives for pension fund investment but are not significantly more reliable than balanced property funds in the short-term as a liability hedge. For real estate fund managers, occupiers, developers and others active in the real estate market, the paper highlights why these funds have been (and are likely to remain) attractive to investors leading to substantial demand for long lease real estate investments.

This is the first study to review this increasingly important part of the UK real estate fund universe.