Research

Universities, students and regional economies: a symbiotic relationship?

Regional Studies, June 2021. (with Tasos Kitsos and Diana Gutierrez-Posada).

This paper examines the heterogeneous effect of student spending in UK NUTS-2 regions. Impact analyses of the more than £45 billion students spend each year have so far been agnostic of the regional absorptive capacity to benefit from this expenditure. Building a multi-regional input–output model for the UK and combining it with data on student expenditure, domicile and level of study, the paper finds significant regional heterogeneity in gross value added and employment multipliers as well as in interregional spillovers. The analysis shows how important student expenditure is for regional economies and the symbiotic relationship between student spending and regional industrial structures that produce varying impact outcomes.

You can find the article here and a blog summarizing the main results here

UK interregional inequality in a historical and international comparative context

National Institute Economic Review. August 2020.(with Philip McCann, Raquel Ortega-Argilés and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose).

This paper explores the nature and scale of inter-regional and inter-urban inequalities in the UK in the context of international comparisons and our aim is to identify the extent to which such inequalities are associated with strong national economic performance. In order to do this, we first discuss the evolution of UK interregional inequalities relative to comparator European economies over more than a century. We then focus specifically on comparisons between the UK and the reunified Germany. These two exercises demonstrate that the experience of the UK has been rather different to other countries. We further explore UK inter-urban inequalities in the light of international evidence and then explain why observations of cities only tell us a partial story about the nature of interregional inequalities, especially in the case of the UK. Finally, we move onto an OECD-wide analysis of the relationships between economic growth and interregional inequality. What we observe is that any such relationships are very weak, and the only real evidence of a positive relationship is in the post-2008 crisis period, a result which points to differentials in regional resilience rather than inequality-led growth. Moreover, once former transition economies are removed from the sample, the relationship disappears, or if anything becomes slightly negative. As such, the international evidence suggests that the UK’s very high spatial inequalities have hampered, rather than facilitated, national economic growth.

You can find the article here

You can also find references to this study in the Financial Times, in The Guardian and

in the White Book for Levelling Up the UK, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State

Rents, resources, and multiple technologies; Ricardian mechanisms in input-output modelling

Economic Systems Research. December 2018. (with Bert Steenge and Maaike Bouwmeester).

To allow for ‘multiple technologies’ to produce a homogeneous output in input–output models, Duchin and Levine (2011) propose an optimization model constrained by primary resources. We show that the Duchin–Levine model contains two different mechanisms by which multiple technologies can arise. If a factor in short supply is shared by the original and the newly entering technology, the output of the original, lower-cost technology will be reduced to make room for the higher-cost technology which is less intensive in that factor. In contrast, if the factor in short supply is technology-specific, a higher-cost technology supplements the original lowest-cost one, which stays fully active. Either mechanism implies a mechanism-specific set of prices, quantities and rents. We relate these results to classical views on comparative advantage, fixed output levels and the origin of rents.

You can find the article here and a blog summarizing the main results here

Drivers of change in the European youth employment: a comparative structural decomposition analysis

Economic Systems Research. April 2017.

This paper uses a structural decomposition approach to examine the proximate causes of change in the EU15 youth workforce from 1995 to 2011. Besides the traditional sources considered by the literature, I include age-specific factors: a labor utilization index that accounts for the hours that employed youth work by showing the extent of part-time contracts; an age mix factor that indicates the share that youth comprise of total employment and, finally, changes in the inverse of the overall sectoral labor productivity, which describes variations in total labor demand. By applying this approach, I identify the core drivers behind the recent changes in the evolution of youth employment in each of the 15 countries; this is crucial for tailoring policy strategies. Results suggest that to foster youth employment, most Mediterranean countries should implement youth-specific measures while other EU15 countries could do so by enhancing overall employment.

You can find the article here

Tourism and income distribution: Evidence from a developed regional economy

Tourism Management. June 2015. (with Melchor Fernández Fernández).

The ways in which tourism consumption affects income distribution involves three channels: changes in prices, earnings of households and government revenues. In this paper, we focus our analysis on the latter two channels through a social accounting matrix (SAM) model of Galicia for the year 2008. This SAM, which is elaborated with a special design for the evaluation of tourism policies, incorporates data for a wide variety of households (eight different types disaggregated by level of income), two governments (regional and central), four types of taxes, four wage earners (classified by education skill) and 29 sectors, among other figures. Furthermore, with the purpose of going deeper into the distributive effects, the traditional multiplicative and additive SAM multiplier decompositions are presented. Results show that the positive effects on all income groups are significant. However, high-income households benefit more than low income ones, contributing to a slight increase in income inequality within the region.

You can find the article here