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This paper offers an exploratory investigation of the effects of inbound commuter flows on employment in regional labour markets in Germany. For this purpose, the paper distinguishes three main channels that may transmit the effects concerned: a crowding-out mechanism and two labour demand effects—namely, an aggregate demand effect and a positive externality on vacancy creation. The results bring to light that, on the whole, commuter flows have a positive and robust effect on both employment and the number of jobs in the receiving labour market districts, but a distinctly negative effect on the share of jobs filled by resident workers. The implications of the results are interpreted and, finally, ways are suggested in which the analysis could be improved and expanded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Self-Organised Criticality (SOC) is a concept developed over the last decade from dynamic systems analysis that aims to investigate the transition trajectories of evolutionary systems. The main emphasis in SOC is on the analysis of the impact of slow exogenous forces in combination with strong localised interactions between single elements or components of the systems concerned, with particular regard to the attainment of a critical state at the macro-level. Against this background, SOC serves to identify the critical conditions from the internal dynamics of the systems that lead to major and significant transformations of their behaviour. The present paper aims to offer insights and reflections originating from the SOC concept, as well as to explore its potential contribution to understanding the evolution of regional economic patterns, in particular the functioning of regional labour markets. In our study, the evolutionary dynamics of employment at a district level in West Germany as well as in the combined West and East German setting will be investigated, in order to detect the possible existence of a power law distribution of growth rates, which may be seen as an indication for SOC at the macro-economic level. In this context, SOC may help to explain the presence of large socio-economic regional fluctuations in a country, and, in general, the dynamics inherent to regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the impact on aggregate regional utility as a result of both exogenous growth and endogenous growth in a spatial system. We will first analyze the case of two closed regions, followed by the case of two open regions. The main instrument used in our approach to study the changes in collective regional welfare is Dynamic Programming. The traditional exogenous Solow growth model forms the basis of our paper. The analysis of this model will be extended to a comparison of two closed regions with exogenous growth. By introducing a case of a common labour market, we are able to investigate exogenous growth between two open regions. For the analysis of endogenous growth, we adopt the same structure as the one used for the investigation of exogenous growth models. In this framework, an investment in knowledge is considered as the endogenous driving force. Finally, we take a closer look at the timing of cost-reducing investments. In total, seven related but distinct cases are identified and studied in more detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]