Clay Collins reviews “Cultural Heritage, Creativity and Economic Development.” Joshua C. Martin reviews “The Public Wealth of Nations: How Management of Public Assets Can Boost or Bust Economic Growth.” Amitrajeet A. Batabyal reviews “The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government, 2004 to 2014.” Colin Steitz reviews “The Robots Are Coming!”

The literature on high school exit exams has found both positive and negative effects of these high stake exams on high school graduation rates. To this point, the literature has not taken into account the embedded nature of school districts within state education systems. We employ a Bayesian Hierarchical SLX model to account for the hierarchical nature of education data in the United States. Our approach also allows us to account for spatial spillovers that influence graduation rates across districts and states. Using school district and state-level data for 45 states and 8194 school districts in the U.S. in 2015, we generally find no statistically significant effect of state exit exams on high school graduation rates. Random effect coefficients, however, point towards high school exit exams being negatively associated with graduation rates in a handful of states.

Mark Jubulis reviews “Handbook on Cohesion Policy in the EU.” Noah Trudeau reviews “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.” Ethan Schmick reviews “How Growth Really Happens: The Making of Economic Miracles through Production, Governance, and Skills.” Allyssa Wadsworth reviews “The Gift of Global Talent.”

Studies of whether unemployment leads to more or fewer firm births and whether firm births reduce unemployment have produced mixed, inconclusive, and even conflicting results. A group of studies have attempted to reconcile these findings by exploring the possibility that the assumed linear relationship may break down and become non-linear, as might be the case if the relationships were space- and time-variant. However, these studies have also produced inconclusive results. The current study extends the analysis in this small but growing literature from the usual single- and multi-country level to the sub-country level while paying particular attention to the role of spatial effects in the firm creation process. We do this by combining spatial exploratory data analysis and spatial econometrics based on panel data for 365 counties in the Mid-Atlantic region from 1999 to 2010. The results show that spatial effects play a crucial role in this process and that ignoring them substantially underestimates the long-run effects of unemployment on firm births. The results also reveal a robust and statistically significant inverted U-shaped relationship in which rising unemployment raises the firm birth rate up to a certain threshold. In addition, a U-shaped relationship where rising firm births lower unemployment for a period but subsequently increase it is observed. These non-linear results help explain some of the conflicting findings in the literature.

The income gap between the richest and the poorest areas in Italy has increased in the last decades. We study the sources of regional wealth that can explain the differences in income and compare rich and poor areas to provide suggestions on how to bridge the gap. A multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) analysis is used to detect the relevant GDP determinants, and a fixed effects model is used to investigate the regional characteristics. The effects of the 2007 crisis are evident in all regions, and some structural weaknesses in the less wealthy areas limit the opportunities to exit the recession and close many socioeconomic gaps with the wealthiest regions.

This paper examines the effects of local taxes and local fiscal expenditures on small businesses in Florida. Our analysis sheds light on the linkage between small business development and local fiscal decisions, which seem to have no obvious or direct connection with targeted business assistance and incentives. Spatial panel regression models are calibrated with county-level tax, expenditure, and social and economic factors for the period of 2008-2013. The estimation results suggest that local tax and expenditure structure and decisions affect the number of small business establishments not only in their “home” counties but also in their neighboring jurisdictions.

This paper explores the relationship between the rising use of economic development incentives (EDI) and rising income inequality within U.S. states. It extends the few papers which investigate state and local income inequality outcomes in the U.S. (Goetz et al., 2011; Shuai, 2015) in three important ways. First, it provides a normative argument for reducing inequality as a policy goal, an issue commonly ignored in empirical applications of inequality. Second, it discusses the channels through which EDI policy can influence equality outcomes in a regional context. Finally, it estimates panel data models for 41 states from 2000 to 2009 using direct measures of EDI and three common measures of income inequality: Gini, top 1 percent income share and top 10 percent income share. The results reveal positive and statistically significant relationships between the one-year lag of EDI values and the three inequality measures. Taken as a whole, the results are consistent with a reverse-Robin-Hood effect where more generous EDI use is associated with redistribution of income from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent of the income distribution.

This paper estimates the effect variation in air quality had on neighborhood population growth in Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s, a period the area experienced severe ozone problems. Regression results indicate that environmental effects substantially redistributed population spatially. Little evidence is found, however, that the demographic effects persist.

“Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation” is reviewed by Santiago Pinto. “ntra-Industry Trade: Cooperation and Conflict in the Global Political Economy” is reviewed by Douglas Mugabe. “Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700” is reviewed by William Levernier. “Political Economy and Instruments of Environmental Politics” is reviewed by Michael E. Reed.

This paper uses information on the productive structure of each of Mexico’s states to calculate a measure of economic complexity using the Method of Reflections proposed by Hausmann and Hidalgo (2009). The results suggest that the country’s states differ markedly in terms of the activities they specialize in, and therefore also in terms of their economic complexity. There is also a clear regional pattern which shows that states in the north are more complex, those in the central region have an intermediate level of complexity, and those in the south have the lowest levels of complexity. As previous international studies have shown, complexity is an important factor in explaining the economic disparities observed in the country, given that its measure is positively related to both the level of wealth and the growth rate of the states. Therefore, we can assert that the dispersion of productive knowledge—measured according to the specialization of the states or the location of the various economic activities performed there—goes some way toward explaining their different patterns of growth.