Search

This study explores how the relatedness density of amenities influences consumer buying patterns, focusing on multi-purpose shopping preferences. Using Seoul's credit card data from 2018 to 2023, we find a clear preference for shopping at amenities close to consumers' residences, particularly for trips within a 2 km radius, where relatedness density significantly influences purchasing decisions. The COVID-19 pandemic initially reduced this effect at shorter distances but rebounded in 2023, suggesting a resilient return to pre-pandemic patterns, which vary over regions. Our findings highlight the resilience of local shopping preferences despite economic disruptions, underscoring the importance of amenity-relatedness in urban consumer behavior., Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures

This study introduces a metric designed to measure urban structures through the economic complexity lens, building on the foundational theories of urban spatial structure, the Central Place Theory (CPT) (Christaller, 1933). Despite the significant contribution in the field of urban studies and geography, CPT has limited in suggesting an index that captures its key ideas. By analyzing various urban big data of Seoul, we demonstrate that PCI and ECI effectively identify the key ideas of CPT, capturing the spatial structure of a city that associated with the distribution of economic activities, infrastructure, and market orientation in line with the CPT. These metrics for urban centrality offer a modern approach to understanding the Central Place Theory and tool for urban planning and regional economic strategies without privacy issues., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures

This study investigates the impact of the 2018 summer heat wave on urban mobility in Seoul and the role of economic complexity in the region's resilience. Findings from subway and mobile phone data indicate a significant decrease in the floating population during extreme heat wave, underscoring the thermal vulnerability of urban areas. However, urban regions with higher complexity demonstrate resilience, attracting more visitors despite high temperatures. Our results suggest the centrality of economic complexity in urban resilience against climate-induced stressors. Additionally, it implies that high-complexity small businesses' clusters can serve as focal points for sustaining urban vitality in the face of thermal shocks within city. In the long run perspective, our results imply the possibility that people are more concentrated in high complexity region in the era of global warming., Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures

This research aims to identify factors that affect the technological transition of firms toward industry 4.0 technologies (I4Ts) focusing on firm capabilities and policy impact using relatedness and complexity measures. For the analysis, a unique dataset of Korean manufacturing firms' patent and their financial and market information was used. Following the Principle of Relatedness, which is a recently shaped empirical principle in the field of economic complexity, economic geography, and regional studies, we build a technology space and then trace each firm's footprint on the space. Using the technology space of firms, we can identify firms that successfully develop a new industry 4.0 technology and examine whether their accumulated capabilities in their previous technology domains positively affect their technological diversification and which factors play a critical role in their transition towards industry 4.0. In addition, by combining data on whether the firms received government support for R&D activities, we further analyzed the role of government policy in supporting firms' knowledge activity in new industry 4.0 technologies. We found that firms with higher related technologies and more government support are more likely to enter new I4Ts. We expect our research to inform policymakers who aim to diversify firms' technological capabilities into I4Ts., Comment: 37 pages, 3 figures, 7 tables

We examine the spillover effect of neighboring ports on regional industrial diversification and their economic resilience using the export data of South Korea from 2006 to 2020. First, we build two distinct product spaces of ports and port regions, and provide direct estimates of the role of neighboring ports as spillover channels spatially linked. This is in contrast to the previous literature that mainly regarded ports as transport infrastructure per se. Second, we confirm that the knowledge spillover effect from neighboring ports had a non-negligible role in sustaining regional economies during the recovery after the economic crisis but its power has weakened recently due to a loosened global value chain.

We investigate predictors of anti-Asian hate among Twitter users throughout COVID-19. With the rise of xenophobia and polarization that has accompanied widespread social media usage in many nations, online hate has become a major social issue, attracting many researchers. Here, we apply natural language processing techniques to characterize social media users who began to post anti-Asian hate messages during COVID-19. We compare two user groups -- those who posted anti-Asian slurs and those who did not -- with respect to a rich set of features measured with data prior to COVID-19 and show that it is possible to predict who later publicly posted anti-Asian slurs. Our analysis of predictive features underlines the potential impact of news media and information sources that report on online hate and calls for further investigation into the role of polarized communication networks and news media., Comment: Accepted at Findings of EMNLP 2021. Please cite our EMNLP Findings 2021 paper!

How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and industries contribute to the diffusion of that knowledge? Here we measure the industry, occupation, and location-specific knowledge carried by workers from one establishment to the next using a dataset summarizing the individual work history for an entire country. We study pioneer firms--firms operating in an industry that was not present in a region--because the success of pioneers is the basic unit of regional economic diversification. We find that the growth and survival of pioneers increase significantly when their first hires are workers with experience in a related industry, and with work experience in the same location, but not with past experience in a related occupation. We compare these results with new firms that are not pioneers and find that industry-specific knowledge is significantly more important for pioneer than non-pioneer firms. To address endogeneity we use Bartik instruments, which leverage national fluctuations in the demand for an activity as shocks for local labor supply. The instrumental variable estimates support the finding that industry-related knowledge is a predictor of the survival and growth of pioneer firms. These findings expand our understanding of the micro-mechanisms underlying regional economic diversification events.

During the last decades two important contributions have reshaped our understanding of international trade. First, countries trade more with those with whom they share history, language, and culture, suggesting that trade is limited by information frictions. Second, countries are more likely to start exporting products that are similar to their current exports, suggesting that knowledge diffusion among related industries is a key constrain shaping the diversification of exports. But does knowledge about how to export to a destination also diffuses among related products and geographic neighbors? Do countries need to learn how to trade each product to each destination? Here, we use bilateral trade data from 2000 to 2015 to show that countries are more likely to increase their exports of a product to a destination when: (i) they export related products to it, (ii) they export the same product to the neighbor of a destination, (iii) they have neighbors who export the same product to that destination. Then, we explore the magnitude of these effects for new, nascent, and experienced exporters, (exporters with and without comparative advantage in a product) and also for groups of products with different level of technological sophistication. We find that the effects of product and geographic relatedness are stronger for new exporters, and also, that the effect of product relatedness is stronger for more technologically sophisticated products. These findings support the idea that international trade is shaped by information frictions that are reduced in the presence of related products and experienced geographic neighbors.

In 1990, Germany began the reunification of two separate research systems. In this study, we explore the factors predicting the East-West integration of academic fields by examining the evolution of Germany's co-authorship network between 1974 and 2014. We find that the unification of the German research network accelerated rapidly during the 1990s, but then stagnated at an intermediate level of integration. We then study the integration of the 20 largest academic fields (by number of publications prior to 1990), finding an inverted U-shaped relationship between each field's East or West "dominance" (a measure of the East-West concentration of a field's scholarly output prior to 1990) and the fields' subsequent level of integration. We checked for the robustness of these results by running Monte Carlo simulations and a differences-in-differences analysis. Both methods confirmed that fields that were dominated by either West or East Germany prior to reunification integrated less than those whose output was balanced. Finally, we explored the origins of this inverted U-shaped relationship by considering the tendency of scholars from a given field to collaborate with scholars from similarly productive regions. These results shed light on the mechanisms governing the reintegration of research networks that were separated by institutions., Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures

Industrial development is the process by which economies learn how to produce new products and services. But how do economies learn? And who do they learn from? The literature on economic geography and economic development has emphasized two learning channels: inter-industry learning, which involves learning from related industries; and inter-regional learning, which involves learning from neighboring regions. Here we use 25 years of data describing the evolution of China's economy between 1990 and 2015--a period when China multiplied its GDP per capita by a factor of ten--to explore how Chinese provinces diversified their economies. First, we show that the probability that a province will develop a new industry increases with the number of related industries that are already present in that province, a fact that is suggestive of inter-industry learning. Also, we show that the probability that a province will develop an industry increases with the number of neighboring provinces that are developed in that industry, a fact suggestive of inter-regional learning. Moreover, we find that the combination of these two channels exhibit diminishing returns, meaning that the contribution of either of these learning channels is redundant when the other one is present. Finally, we address endogeneity concerns by using the introduction of high-speed rail as an instrument to isolate the effects of inter-regional learning. Our differences-in-differences (DID) analysis reveals that the introduction of high speed-rail increased the industrial similarity of pairs of provinces connected by high-speed rail. Also, industries in provinces that were connected by rail increased their productivity when they were connected by rail to other provinces where that industry was already present. These findings suggest that inter-regional and inter-industry learning played a role in China's great economic expansion., Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables