This paper provides new evidence that US state policies can affect the location of manufacturing activity. The paper extends the literature by analyzing industry-level panel data from 1974–1994. Results from the two-stage empirical model support ex ante intuition that divergence in state policy and/or characteristics affects specific manufacturing industries differently. Econometric techniques employed herein address many of the criticisms of previous work in this area.

The urban economic growth and suburbanization had increased the number of suburban commuters using rail transit in the Osaka metropolitan area for 40 years since the 1950s. This trend reversed to continuous shrinkage in the 1990s. The reduction in passengers may lead to financial problems for the operators and an increase in railway fares or decline in quality of service. This study investigates the factors responsible for the decline in demand for rail service by analyzing changes in population and commuters using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and small area statistics linked with locations of urban rail networks. The results indicate that the dispersion of jobs from 1990 to 2000 significantly reduced commutes by rail. Demographic analysis shows that because of low fertility rates and the rapidly aging population the decline in the number of commuters will intensify in coming decades, causing serious financial problems for railway operators.

This paper analyzes slum dwellers' access to basic amenities and the ways in which they gain access. Associations between Indian states' share of slums, proportions of notified slums, and prevailing conditions in terms of basic amenities present political contact as a key factor. Based on the political economy framework, slum survey data (2004–2005) show that political contact helps access facilities such as land tenure and basic amenities. The logit model identifies determinants of political contact by examining social networks and individual endowments. While political accessibility is crucial as a survival strategy, slum dwellers' vulnerability hardly diminishes over time; on the contrary, the political use of slums perpetuates it. However, strong social networks can prevent low income households from declining to a low equilibrium. The role of political contact is less applicable in other Asian countries. Instead, rational policies have greater relevance in improving the conditions of these low income households.

A three-area interregional Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) model is used to analyze economic interdependencies and relevant diffusion patterns within and between rural-urban localities in Southern Greece: the rural areas of Archanes and N. Kazantzakis and the urban area of Heraklion. Both rural areas trickle significant economic benefits to the urban area, while the urban area has marginal linkages with them. Policy simulation analysis results have indicated that farm income support measures are important to Archanes, since reduced spending in farm income support creates significant negative impacts on firm and household income, and is not compensated by an equivalent increase in rural development policy spending. These findings do not hold for the diffusion of economic impacts towards N. Kazantzakis and Heraklion; results of this simulation show that positive economic benefits are still diffused to both the wealthier urban area and the adjacent poorer rural area of N. Kazantzakis.

This paper discusses public abatement financed by pollution tax revenue or tariff revenue and investigates the welfare consequences of a tariff. The main result of this paper is that under certain conditions a tariff reduction results in an improvement in welfare through an increase in public abatement and a decrease in pollution. This result may guide policy for countries that wish to harmonize trade liberalization and the environmental protection demonstrated by both the private and the public sectors.

The literature is inconclusive about the economic impact of a highway bypasses on small town business districts. Locally imposed sales tax data can be used to construct cross-sectional, times series data for towns too small to be analyzed using U.S. Census data. With this data we examine bypass impacts using standard difference-in-difference methods and supplement the analysis with quasi-experimental analysis. The case study investigates the 1993 bypass of Stonewall, Oklahoma, a town of approximately 530 people. The analysis indicates the bypass highway had no significant effect on the already declining small town business district. The approach demonstrated in this paper can be used to assess the impacts of a wide range of policy treatments at the sub-county level.

We analyze the economic impacts of industrial organizational struggles on the international liner shipping market. Operating ratios of different markets are discussed by incorporating rate, service level, and other variables into a standard microeconomic model. If two different carriers agree on a shipping conference price and/or share a strategic alliance service level, and maximize consolidated profit, a member carrier finds it easier to make its operation profitable than the individual profit optimization case; other carriers are worse off in becoming profitable. If the carriers face inelastic demand, the price continues rising until demand becomes elastic enough for the equilibrium to be relevant. The conference is expected to play a coordination role so that the market does not become unsustainable in the adjustment process to reach equilibrium.

The objective of this paper is to study the importance of price index methodology to analyzing intra-metropolitan house price variations in Mumbai. Two hedonic regression-based approaches – cross section and explicit time variable – are compared. The results indicate conclusively that the former is better than the latter. This paper also contributes to the literature on intra-metropolitan house price variations by explaining them based on urban development, population and employment patterns in Mumbai.

Previous studies of gaming have not calculated numerically the negative, economy-wide impacts on the Nevada economy from potential expansion of the gaming industry outside of the state. This study uses a state-level, two-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of Nevada to investigate such impacts. In the Nevada CGE, both commodity prices and factor prices are endogenously determined and the impacts on major economic variables such as output, employment, and government revenue are estimated. Three different model variants are specified. Each variant is based on different assumptions regarding intersectoral and interregional factor mobility to analyze model sensitivity. Results show that the impacts on Nevada of the nationwide expansion of gaming could be significant under reasonable assumptions about factor mobility for Nevada. Also, results for total regional output and total government revenue are found to be very sensitive to the alternative factor mobility assumptions.