Location Of New Plants Research Articles

Creative milieu and firm location: An empirical appraisal

This paper focuses on the creative industries – those industries that produce and commercialise creative goods and services – and the role played by the existing spatial distribution and agglomeration economies of these kinds of activities in their location decisions. Our main statistical source is the Register of Manufacturing Establishments of Catalonia (REIC), which has plant-level microdata on the location of new plants. We use count data models to show that location determinants are quite similar in both creative and non-creative industries and that both industries are positively influenced by the specialisation level of creative industries. Moreover, our results provide evidence that an unobserved ‘ creative milieu’ has a considerable impact on attracting firms.

Application of neural networks to the management of voltage constraints in the Spanish market

The security criteria of a power system require that branch power flows and bus voltages are within their limits, not only in normal operating conditions but also when any credible contingency occurs. In the Spanish electricity market, voltage constraints are solved by connecting a set of off-line generators located in the areas where they occur. Thus, for a market participant it is necessary to predict approximately when its generating units are connected in order to prepare the annual budget and/or decide the time and location of new plants. The authors have presented in a former paper a methodology based on decision trees to estimate the daily load pattern of units, which have not been cleared in the daily energy market and can be connected to alleviate voltage constraints. In this paper, considering a set of potential explanatory variables, a different methodology based on neural networks is proposed to forecast if a non-connected unit will be committed by the System Operator to remove voltage violations. The performance of neural networks is illustrated with a study case. In addition, a thorough comparison with the methodology based on decision trees is carried out.

Firm Location Decisions, Regional Grants and Agglomeration Externalities

We examine whether discretionary government grants influence the location of new plants. Grants have a small effect in attracting plants to specific geographic areas, but their effectiveness increases with agglomeration externalities, measured by the number of other plants in that location in the same industry. We also find evidence that regional industrial structure affects the location of new entrants: firms in more agglomerated industries locate new plants near to others in the same industry, and firms are also attracted to industrially diversified locations. Foreign multinationals locate new plants near to other foreign-owned plants in the same industry.

Decision Trees Applied to the Management of Voltage Constraints in the Spanish Market

The security criteria of a power system require that branch power flows and bus voltages are within their limits, not only in normal operating conditions but also when any credible contingency occurs. In the Spanish electricity market, voltage constraints are solved by connecting a set of offline generators located in the areas where they occur. Thus, for a market participant it is necessary to predict approximately when its generating units are connected in order to prepare the annual budget and/or decide the time and location of new plants. This paper proposes a methodology based on decision trees to estimate the daily load pattern of units that have not been cleared in the daily energy market and can be connected to alleviate the network constraints in the Spanish power system. The method explains the behavior of the daily load patterns of a nonconnected unit (obtained through clustering techniques) with a set of explanatory variables. The explanatory variables consist of the demand-generation imbalance in the electrical area of the generating unit and the maintenance scheduling of the transmission lines that feed the area. The method proposed is illustrated with a case study.

Adding a Stick to the Carrot: Location Incentives with Clawbacks, Recisions, and Recalibrations

The escalation of incentive awards to attract and retain new business has emerged as a major concern in state and local development policy. This article addresses claw-back provisions, a largely neglected part of the bargaining process between governments and businesses in the location of new plants and offices. Just as private business transactions work within a framework of legally binding contracts, clawbacks provide some recourse to reclaim all or some of a financing package when a firm fails to meet performance requirements. Besides analyzing clawbacks, the authors identify three related areas for policy intervention: penalties, recisions, and recalibrations. The aim of this article is to show that U.S. policymakers can avoid expensive mistakes if they tie incentives to written guarantees of job creation and other benefits. European regional policymakers have used a carrot-and-stick approach to industrial recruitment. Increasingly, state and city governments in the United States also recognize that public-private bargaining requires some form of reasonable, guaranteed quid pro quo.

Rural industrial location versus rural industrial growth

This study was designed to test the hypothesis that the location of new plants is associated with a different set of factors than is the location of industrial growth. The conceptual basis for this hypothesis is that most industrial growth occurs by expansion and contraction of existing establishments, and is constrained by investment. New plants are less constrained and may select a different type of community. To test this hypothesis a pair of models was developed for each of nine four digit Standard Industrial Class Manufacturing industries. Each model in a pair contained the same set of independent variables but one model used a dependent variable reflecting growth and the other used a dependent variable reflecting location. The results were that in nine pairs of models only one community characteristic type variable was significant in both the growth and location models. This supports the hypothesis that industrial growth and location are associated with different factors. In general, growth occurs in the larger communities with better services and lower poverty rates. Location is not associated with those community characteristics but is responsive to the availability of intermediate inputs and market access.

Industrial Development Agencies and the Location of New Plants

Industrial Development Agencies and the Location of New Plants