Andrés Rodríguez-Pose ranked among the top-20 geographers worldwide

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is prominently featured in the international ranking of geographers published in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Economic Geography ("Measuring the influentialness of economic geographers during the 'great half century': an approach using the h index"). It measures the impact between 1970 and today of researchers in geography according to their h-index (a researcher is said to have an h-index of n if he or she has published n articles that have each been cited at least n times). In the ranking that includes geographers from all countries and all branches of geography except physical geography, and which takes into account the date of publication of articles (Table 3 in the article), Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is ranked 16th worldwide and is the only Spanish geographer listed.

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IMDEA Social Sciences welcomes Dr. María José Luengo-Prado as Visiting Senior Research Fellow

María José Luengo-Prado will be visiting IMDEA Social Sciences from January 2010. She holds a PhD in Economics from Brown University, an MSc in Economics from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a BA in Economics from Universidad de Salamanca. She is on sabbatical leave from Northeastern University in Boston, where she is a tenured Associate Professor of Economics. Her research interests include Macroeconomics (both theoretical and applied) and Public Economics. Her research has focused on understanding households' consumption and savings decisions under uncertainty and the effect of these decisions on the broader economy.

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An interview with Benigno Valdés

Dr. Benigno Valdés, Director General of IMDEA Social Sciences, comments on IMDEA and the role of science and scientists in economic growth and social welfare, in an interview published on 10 November 2009 in Revista CEIM, the official magazine of the Madrid Federation of Entrepreneurs.

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Javier G. Polavieja appointed to CEACS's Advisory Scientific Committee

Dr. Javier G. Polavieja, Research Fellow at IMDEA Social Sciences, has been appointed member of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (CEACS, Juan March Institute), with effect January 2010.

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Sevinc Cukurova, writing her PhD dissertation under the supervision of José M. Marín

Sevinc Cukurova is writing her PhD dissertation under the supervision of IMDEA Research Professor José M. Marín and Professor Juan Santaló of IE Business School. She holds a BA in Economics from Bogazici University in Turkey, an MSc in the same subject from Istanbul Bilgi University, and a Master of Research from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is currently a PhD Candidate at IE Business School. Her main areas of research are portfolio management, corporate finance, asset pricing and applied game theory. Her current work focuses on Hedge Funds characteristics and Corporate Diversification.

Jorge De la Roca, writing his PhD dissertation under the supervision of Diego Puga

Jorge De la Roca is writing his PhD dissertation under the supervision of IMDEA Research Professor Diego Puga. De la Roca is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI), where he completed a Master's degree in Economics and Finance. Previously he obtained a BA in Economics at Universidad del Pacífico in Lima. His research interests comprise urban economics, economic geography and labor economics. In his current research he estimates the magnitude of agglomeration economies in Spain and explores how agglomeration premia accumulate over time. More broadly, Jorge De la Roca is interested in pursuing structural estimation of the contributions of potential channels to the formation of agglomeration economies in cities.

Gabriela Godoy, writing her PhD dissertation under the supervision of José M. Marín

Gabriela Godoy is writing her PhD dissertation under the supervision of IMDEA Research Professor José M. Marín. She holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Chile, an MBA with specialization in finance from ESADE Business School, and an MS in Quantitative Finance from AFI. She is currently enrolled in the PhD Program in Banking and Quantitative Finance jointly offered by the University of Valencia, University of Castilla-La Mancha, University of the Basque Country and Complutense University of Madrid. Ms. Godoy holds a Doctoral Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. Her research agenda focuses on the analysis of trading activity by insiders and its impact on asset prices.

Contract to complete the rehabilitation of IMDEA Social Sciences premises awarded

The contract to complete the rehabilitation and expansion of the permanent premises of IMDEA Social Sciences at Cantoblanco, worth just over 3 million euros plus VAT, has been awarded to Aldesa Construcciones S.A. This was the outcome of a public tendering process initiated October 2009. Completion is expected in eight months and the temporary premises in Tres Cantos will continue to be used until the permanent premises are ready.

Wake up and smell the ginseng: International trade and the rise of incremental innovation in low-wage countries

Diego Puga and Daniel Trefler
Journal of Development Economics 91(1), January 2010: 64-76

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Spatial development

Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

IMDEA WP No. 2009-18, December 2009

We present a theory of spatial development. A continuum of locations in a geographic area choose each period how much to innovate (if at all) in manufacturing and services. Locations can trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially across locations. The result is an endogenous growth theory that can shed light on the link between the evolution of economic activity over time and space. We apply the model to study the evolution of the U.S. economy in the last few decades and find that the model can generate the reduction in the employment share in manufacturing, the increase in service productivity in the second part of the 1990s, the increase in land rents in the same period, as well as several other spatial and temporal patterns.

This paper is included in the IMDEA Social Sciences Working Paper Series through the PROCIUDAD-CM Programme.

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The political economy of ethnolinguistic cleavages

Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín and Romain Wacziarg

IMDEA WP No. 2009-17, December 2009

This paper proposes a new method to measure ethnolinguistic diversity and offers new results linking such diversity with a range of political economy outcomes — civil conflict, redistribution, economic growth and the provision of public goods. We use linguistic trees, describing the genealogical relationship between the entire set of 6, 912 world languages, to compute measures of fractionalization and polarization at different levels of linguistic aggregation. By doing so, we let the data inform us on which linguistic cleavages are most relevant, rather than making ad hoc choices of linguistic classifications. We find drastically different effects of linguistic diversity at different levels of aggregation: deep cleavages, originating thousands of years ago, lead to measures of diversity that are better predictors of civil conflict and redistribution than those that account for more recent and superficial divisions. The opposite pattern holds when it comes to the impact of linguistic diversity on growth and public goods provision, where finer distinctions between languages matter.

This paper is included in the IMDEA Social Sciences Working Paper Series through the PROCIUDAD-CM Programme.

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On Spatial dynamics

Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

IMDEA WP No. 2009-16, December 2009

It has long been recognized that the forces that lead to the agglomeration of economic activity and to aggregate growth are similar. Unfortunately, few formal frameworks have been advanced to explore this link. We critically discuss the literature and present a simple framework that can circumvent some of the main obstacles we identify. We discuss the main characteristics of an equilibrium allocation in this dynamic spatial framework, present a numerical example to illustrate the forces at work, and provide some supporting empirical evidence.

This paper is included in the IMDEA Social Sciences Working Paper Series through the PROCIUDAD-CM Programme.

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Returns to migration, education, and externalities in the European Union

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Vassilis Tselios

IMDEA WP No. 2009-15, November 2009

Firms and workers are much more productive in large and dense urban environments. There is substantial evidence of such agglomeration economies based on three aproaches. First, on a clustering of production beyond what can be explained by chance or comparative advantage. Second, on spatial patterns in wages and rents. Third, on systematic variations in productivity with the urban environment. However, more needs to be learned about the causes of agglomeration economies. We have good models of agglomeration through sharing and matching, but not a deep enough understanding of learning in cities. Despite recent progress, more work is needed to distinguish empirically between alternative causes.

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Labor-market exposure as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration

Francesc Ortega and Javier G. Polavieja

IMDEA WP No. 2009-14, October 2009

This paper re-examines the role of labor-market competition as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration. We claim two main contributions. First, we use more sophisticated measures of the degree of exposure to competition from immigrants than previously done. Specifically, we focus on the protection derived from investments in job-specific human capital and from specialization in communication-intensive jobs, in addition to formal education. Second, we explicitly account for the potential endogeneity arising from job search. Methodologically, we estimate, by instrumental variables, an econometric model that allows for heterogeneity at the individual, regional, and country level. Drawing on the 2004 European Social Survey, we obtain three main results. First, our estimates show that individuals that are currently employed in less exposed jobs are relatively more pro-immigration. This is true for both our new measures of exposure. Second, we show that the protection granted by job-specific human capital is clearly distinct from the protection granted by formal education. Yet the positive effect of education on pro-immigration attitudes is greatly reduced when we control for the degree of communication intensity of respondents' occupations. Third, OLS estimates are biased in a direction that suggests that natives respond to immigration by switching to less exposed jobs. The latter finding provides indirect support for the endogenous job specialization hypothesis postulated by Peri and Sparber (2009).

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Innovating in the periphery: Firms, values, and innovation in Southwest Norway

Rune Dahl Fitjar and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

IMDEA WP No. 2009-13, October 2009

How do peripheral and relatively isolated regions innovate? Recent research has tended to stress the importance of agglomeration economies and geographical proximity as key motors of innovation. According to this research, large core areas have significant advantages with respect to peripheral areas in innovation potential. Yet, despite these trends, some remote areas of the periphery are remarkably innovative even in the absence of critical innovation masses. In this paper we examine one such case – the region of Southwest Norway – which has managed to remain innovative and dynamic, despite having a below average investment in R&D in the Norwegian context. The results of the paper highlight that innovation in Southwest Norway does not stem from agglomeration and physical proximity, but from other types of proximity, such as cognitive and organizational proximity, rooted in soft institutional arrangements. This suggests that the formation of regional hubs with strong connections to international innovative networks may be a way to overcome peripherality in order to innovate.

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Equilibrium blocking in large quasilinear economies

Tatyana Kreshkova and Roberto Serrano

IMDEA WP No. 2009-12, October 2009

We study information transmission in large interim quasilinear economies using the theory of the core. We concentrate on the core with respect to equilibrium blocking, a core notion in which information is transmitted endogenously within coalitions, as blocking can be understood as an equilibrium of a communication mechanism used by players in coalitions. We consider independent, ex-post and signal-based replicas of the basic economy. For each, we offer an array of negative and positive convergence results as a function of the complexity of the mechanisms used by coalitions. We identify conditions under which asymmetric information remains as an externality and non-market outcomes stay in the core, as well as those for the core to converge to the set of incentive compatible ex-post Walrasian allocations. Further, all the results are robust to the relaxation of the incentive constraints, and hence suggest a process through which information may get incorporated into a fully revealing equilibrium price function.

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