calculated inequality portfolio benchmarking and regional office property investment in the uk the paper explores the reasons for the persistence in the uk of significant relative interregional variations in office property investment in the face of economic theory and empirical evidence that would support its more even spatial distribution the argument is made from a cultural economy perspective and involves the application to property of a concept drawn from the accountancy literature calculative practice uk investment decision making is distinguished by the primacy attributed to portfolio benchmarking as an influence on investment strategy the wider logic underpinning property benchmarking is subjected to critical appraisal then evidence is presented that suggests that benchmarking is a self referential practice which results in convergence and rigidity in fund structures and in the concentration of performance around a bounded range of sub optimal returns it is a barrier to the greater geographical diversification of office property investment

working for regional development the case of canadian labour sponsored investment funds lincoln a 2000 working for regional development the case of canadian labour sponsored investment funds reg studies 34 727 737 in today s global economy a number of challenges have been posed for workers and community members however despite being weakened by multinational capital and neo liberal policy agendas workers and trade unions remain capable of shaping the geography of capitalism while uk and us labour organizations have considered a range of strategies to protect their members an innovative and impressive attempt at tackling the politics of finance and capital has come from within the canadian labour movement in attempting to resist globalization certain canadian unions have actively engaged with the investment of their members pension fund money through the creation of labour sponsored investment funds in this paper i draw on empirical material collected in canada to explore the development of these labour sponsored funds through investing in these provincial funds

virtual special issue editorial essay the shitty rent business what s the point of land rent theory in this introduction to a virtual special issue on land rent we sketch out the history of land rent theory encompassing classical political economy marx s political economy the marginalist turn and subsequent foundations for urban economics and the marxist consensus around rent theory during geography s spatial turn we then overview some of the contemporary strands of literature that have developed since the break down of this consensus namely political economy approaches centred on capital switching institutionalism of various stripes and the rent gap theory we offer a critical urban political economy perspective and a particular set of arguments run through the review first land is not the same as capital but has unique attributes as a factor of production which require a separate theorisation second since the 1970s consensus around land rent and the city dissipated the critical literature has tended to take the question of why how the payment exists at all for granted and so has ignored the particular dynamics of rent arising from the idiosyncrasies of land amongst the talk of an anthropocene and planetary urbanisation it is surprising that the economic fulcrum of the capitalist remaking of geography has fallen so completely off the agenda it is time to bring rent back into the analysis of land cities and capitalism

a joint investigation of public support and public values case of instream flows in new mexico abstract instream flow can be defined as the flow of water in its natural channels without diversion alone among the western us states new mexico nm fails to provide any mechanism for the protection of instream flows and has a long history of political resistance to any change in the status quo using the combined results from two statewide telephone surveys this study jointly investigates stated voting preferences for a proposed institutional change and stated valuation preferences for minimum instream flow protection the contingent valuation cv question uses a dichotomous choice dc elicitation format and a voluntary contribution trust fund payment vehicle results show a highly significant positive correlation between expressed voting preferences and expressed valuation preferences additionally those individuals who respond yes to the voting question have an expected willingness to pay wtp of 80 with a 95 confidence interval ci that is always positive 62 97 while those who respond no to the voting question have an expected wtp that is actually slightly negative 6 with a 95 ci containing zero 14 2 taken together these results provide evidence of construct validity estimation results are also shown to be temporally reliable across repeated samples thus there is strong evidence of public support for instream flow protection and its associated nonmarket benefits such evidence helps to provide instream flow concerns with standing in future nm water policy debates prominent examples include explicitly defining beneficial use and public welfare to allow consideration of instream flow protection

development of financial intermediation and the dynamics of urban rural disparity in china 1978 1998 chen y p liu m and zhang q development of financial intermediation and the dynamics of urban rural disparity in china 1978 1998 regional studies this paper focuses on the impacts of financial intermediation development on the urban rural income disparity urid in china using a twenty year province level panel data set from 1978 to 1998 it is found that the change of urid may be explained by fiscal policy during the early reform period 1978 1989 and financial intermediates during the later reform period 1990 1998 in addition it is shown that the direction the kuznets effect an inverted u shaped relationship between per capita gross domestic product and urid is sensitive to changes in government development policies this study adds to the spatial economic inequality literature by clarifying the effects of urban biased financial intermediation policy on the underlying dynamics of convergent and divergent effects on urban rural inequality chen y p liu m et zhang q le developpement

the regional financial sector a scottish case study dow s c 1992 the regional financial sector a scottish case study reg studies 26 619 631 the regional finance literature suggests that financial market segmentation may affect regional economic activity but that the uk financial sector is sufficiently integrated to rule out this effect this paper attempts to broaden the scope of the debate by considering the credit creating behaviour of the banking sector together with the interdependent financial behaviour of all other sectors in a region it is concluded that financial behaviour in this broad sense affects regional activity even in an integrated national financial market in particular financial integration may adversely affect the allocation of new credit to a peripheral region the argument is assessed by considering the scottish case dow s c 1992 le secteur financier regional cas d etude de l ecosse reg studies 26 619 631 la documentation relative au secteur financier regional laisse supposer que la segmentation du marche finan

exploring the notional property developer as a policy construct this paper explores how far policy makers understand the structure of the development industry the perceived characteristics of developers and the extent to which such actors can be considered policy responsive if these matters are poorly understood the effectiveness of planning policy may be undermined especially where the private sector is responsible for undertaking most development the paper is based upon empirical research on the scottish executive s perceptions of and policy stances towards developers between 1999 and 2007 it finds that the executive appeared to have only limited understanding of what drives the development process or motivates individual developers and seemed unfamiliar with important differences within the industry sectorally and geographically instead the notional property developer was incorrectly conceived as a malleable and potentially compliant partner with shared objectives to the state the paper calls for a more thorough understanding of the development industr

evaluation of investor behaviour in urban regeneration the financing of urban regeneration and levering of private sector investment remains a major policy issue this article utilising the results of a behavioural survey analyses the motivations of

social behaviour as a basis for modelling the urban housing market a review this paper considers how empirical models of urban housing markets might be constructed as a basis for policy analysis it is suggested that this is fundamentally more difficult than national or re

global microstructures the virtual societies of financial markets using participant observation data interviews and trading transcripts drawn from interbank currency trading in global investment banks this article examines regular patterns of integration that characterize the global social system embedded in economic transactions to interpret these patterns which are global in scope but microsocial in character this article uses the term global microstructures features of the interaction order loosely defined have become constitutive of and implanted in processes that have global breadth this study draws on schutz in the development of the concept of temporal coordination as the basis for the level of intersubjectivity discerned in global markets this article contributes to economic sociology through the analysis of cambist i e trading markets which are distinguished from producer markets and by positing a form of market coordination that supplements relational or network forms of coordination

us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective rey s j and montouri b d 1999 us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective reg studies 33 143 156 this study reconsiders the question of us regional economic income convergence from a spatial econometric perspective recently developed methods of exploratory spatial data analysis provide new insights on the geographical dynamics of us regional income growth patterns over the 1929 94 period strong patterns of both global and local spatial autocorrelation are found throughout the study period and the magnitude of global spatial autocorrelation is also found to exhibit strong temporal co movement with regional income dispersion a spatial econometric analysis of the familiar baumol specification reveals strong evidence of misspecification due to ignored spatial error dependence because of this dependence shocks originating in one state can spillover into surrounding states potentially complicating the transitional dynamics of the convergence process rey s j et montouri

financialisation the valuation of investment property and the urban built environment in the uk the financialisation literature has been criticised for its limited empirical base and its failure adequately to link the everyday world with that of high finance the paper addresses these shortcomings by examining the calculative practice of property valuation the way that valuations are performed affects their results and therefore the operation of the property market the paper traces the evolving influence of finance capital on the valuation of commercial property in the uk by constructing a historiography of investment valuation since 1960 traditional approaches to valuation have been increasingly challenged by those derived from financial economics however the former remains the dominant method for undertaking market valuation its grounding in comparison a centring and standardising process offers an explanation for some of the changes in the urban built environment that are ascribed to financialisation this suggests that a more detailed and historically sensitive interpretation of financialisation is required

banking activities and local output growth does distance from centre matter ozyildirim s and onder z banking activities and local output growth does distance from centre matter regional studies in this paper the relation between local banking activities and local output growth is empirically studied in turkey during the period 1991 2000 although there is no legal restriction against regional banking the banking sector is spatially concentrated in turkey in this institutional structure the distance between headquarters and the local branches is argued to affect the role of financial intermediation in the development of provincial prosperity empirical findings suggest that banking activities have a significant positive impact on the per capita local output growth of regions especially on those that are distant from the financial centre however when bank loans are adjusted to the size of the local economy provincial gross domestic product gdp the relation between banking activities and the output per capita is found to be negative suggesting that these loans are us

some unsettled problems of irrigation 1911 a reprint of the lead article in the inaugural issue of the american economic review some unsettled problems of irrigation by katharine coman who examined the common property resource problem as applied to water in the western united states

the profits of foreign firms in a less developed country ghana abstract using a proxy for the rate of profit this study does not confirm for ghana 1970 the hypothesis that foreign firms make excessive profits as compared with other ownership groups of firms instead the general tendency of the data is to rank the rates of profit for mixed private local foreign and private local firms higher than those of wholly foreign mixed state foreign and wholly state owned firms explanations of these observations in terms of transfer pricing through imports and differential cost reduction incentives available to the firms are attempted

institutions in british property research a review this paper surveys approaches to the study of institutions as used in recent commercial property research in britain institutional analysis can be approached from mainstream economics power str

convergence and difference in regional office development cycles in this paper data and analytical techniques not hitherto employed for the purpose have been used to explore the particularities of the role played by finance capital in influencing the spatio tem

cultural explanation of regional property markets a critique in a recent paper in this journal simon guy and john henneberry 2000 proposed an institutional approach to property markets that emphasises exceptional behaviour on the part of particular market agents using this cultural approach they claimed to have evidence that london based property investors deliberately underinvest in british property outside southern england this paper criticises their dismissal of pre existing economic and institutional property market analysis and questions the validity of their empirical conclusions

familiarity and the determination of yields for regional office property investments in the uk henneberry j and mouzakis f familiarity and the determination of yields for regional office property investments in the uk regional studies this paper examines how effectively investment yields incorporate spatial variations in risks and returns into property prices it is hypothesized that the pricing of property investments in non core uk regions is affected by a pure familiarity heuristic adopted by investors based in london consequently the determination of office yields is based not on the intrinsic investment characteristics of regional markets but on a core market benchmark combined with a regional premium this results in very long term mispricing patterns with implications not just for the office property investment market but also for the regions especially those outside the core

development cultures and urban regeneration the importance of levering private finance and investment into urban regeneration is a central consideration of policy attention has focused on institutional investors motives for holding regeneration investments and on how they might be encouraged to put more money into inner city areas the paper argues that while helpful the impact of such an approach upon urban regeneration will be limited this is because by definition institutional investors are only interested in institutional property and buildings which do not conform to this frame of reference will not be of interest to them however other actors see things differently independent developers embrace the challenge presented by fringe locations mixed uses and the local urban culture and aesthetic and translate these characteristics into development values urban policy needs to address the contrasting ways in which the nature construction and application of investors strategic rationality intercept with local development conditions in particular greater emphasis should be given to encouraging independent locally based forms of property investment and development

finance capital actor network theory and the struggle over calculative agencies in the business property markets of mexico city metropolitan region david l and halbert l finance capital actor network theory and the struggle over calculative agencies in the business property markets of mexico city metropolitan region regional studies the selective spatialities of business property in the mexico city metropolitan region are explained with reference to actor network theory building on a conception of markets as the outcomes of the confrontation between different calculative agencies the paper discusses how investment managers have to negotiate the integration of new buildings and spaces into their portfolios alongside pre existing actor networks whose power and autonomy differ across the metropolitan area in a fragmented city region the longstanding urban coalition in the central part of the area may lock out the business property development market to finance capital while some peripheral areas may be more opened up

the success and failure of dependency theory the experience of ghana dependency theory is a set of ideas with a strong potential for influencing policy actions in the third world originally developed during the late 1960s to explain the problems of development in latin america by scholars working in that region the theory has attracted a great deal of attention both in the literature and in third world countries though the logical consistency and empirical validity of the theory have been questioned evidence about the influence of dependency theory on the economic policies of specific countries has been scant in this article i provide some such evidence i also evaluate the potential for devising viable economic policies within the theory

buyer exuberance and price premium it has been demonstrated that the real estate market disciplines irrational price premiums however the persistence of price premiums begs the question of what causes price premiums in the first place this paper seeks to examine two explanations for price premiums the conventional information asymmetry explanation and the buyer exuberance explanation as motivated by behavioural studies the results show that information asymmetry explains price premiums and this finding is robust across two sub hypotheses tested namely information differences arising from market familiarity and product characteristics in addition we find that price premiums are also caused by buyer exuberance specifically exuberance arising from representativeness purchasing power and anchoring effects

the growth and geographical anatomy of venture capitalism in the united kingdom martin r l 1989 the growth and geographical anatomy of venture capitalism in the united kingdom reg studies 23 389 403 the 1980s have seen the emergence and rapid growth of venture capitalism in the uk this paper examines this growth both in terms of the spatial organization of the venture capital industry and the regional distribution of venture capital investment the picture that emerges is of an industry which is over centralized in the london area and which in the course of its recent development has tended to concentrate investment in the already more prosperous southeastern and adjacent parts of the country while local venture capital markets are beginning to become established in northern britain it will be some time before the existing regional imbalance is likely to be redressed martin r l 1989 la croissance et la distribution geographique du capital risque au royaume uni reg studies 23 389 403 les annees 1980 ont temoigne de la naissance et de l essor du capital risque au

interest rates and convergence across italian regions dow s montagnoli a and napolitano o interest rates and convergence across italian regions regional studies the purpose of this paper is to investigate the evidence for economic convergence across italian regions using trends in interest rate spreads and premia as indicators of regional credit conditions the results indicate the presence of persistent interest rate differentials and thus an absence of convergence across the twenty political regions but a high degree of convergence is observed within the four macroeconomic areas dow s montagnoli a and napolitano o 20 dow s montagnoli a et napolitano o les taux d interet et la convergence a travers les regions italiennes regional studies a partir des tendances des marges d interet sur les credits et des primes sur les taux d interet comme indicateurs des conditions de credit regionales cet article cherch

performing housing markets this paper offers an interpretation of how housing markets work which complements more traditional economic approaches building on a wider movement within cultural economy and economic sociology it considers how housing markets are variously performed in the power filled negotiations of buyers sellers and market professionals this is part of a larger undertaking but here the focus is particularly on the role of legal financial and information intermediaries in shaping local cultures of property exchange this is a social rather than economic analysis of housing markets it is a qualitative rather than a quantitative study it is designed to shed light on how markets are made though it might in the end change the way they are modelled

the la nder are the building blocks of the german capital market data on major voting blocks in the german officially listed companies for the end of 1997 and may 2001 are used in order to explore the spatial dimensions of the system of corporate control listed companies are very unevenly distributed and their institutional and geographical concentration has not decreased holdings of voting blocks in companies are in turn getting more and more dispersed but the majority of corporate control is still intraregional with the holders of voting rights coming from the same lander as the controlled corporations gravity equations show that distance is a very strong determinant of corporate control links and its role applies to all types of companies and holders though to a varying degree from the perspective of corporate control the german capital market is very regionalized considering that the study spans a short period of time however the pace of integration is pronounced a partir des donnees sur les principaux regroupements de votes dans les societes allema

introduction the financialisation of urban production conditions mediations and transformations a distinctive feature of urban spaces lies in their high infrastructural density because buildings roads stadiums airports are all capital intensive they rely in turn on financial infrastructures that circulate not passengers power or data but capital more or less temporarily fixed in the urban built environment harvey 2001 like many infrastructures edwards 2003 financial ones remain invisible to most but for cases of major disruptions think for instance of how the subprime crisis revealed the interconnection between households mortgages and capital markets this relative invisibility should however not obfuscate the importance of financial circuits in the design construction exploitation and ownership of the urban built environment urban production from here on researchers in urban studies unevenly pay attention to financial circuits understood here as the sociotechnical systems that channel investments in the forms of equity and debt into urban production major accounts of city making under neoliberalisation from the 1990s and 2000s are a case in point such studies mainly focus on evolving rationales for public intervention and the resulting changes in public actors modes of operation where welfare provision gives way to entrepreneurial policies harvey 1989 moulaert et al 2003 tasan kok and baeten 2012 the growing importance of private investments and the concomitant reconfiguration of public spending is mostly acknowledged as a contextual factor while the private investors and international finance capital targeted by public authorities remain in the background of analyses there is thus a dearth of conceptualisation and of evidence on how private financiers and investors collectively or individually shape or adjust to this new context and on the role played by those acting at the interface between public and private bodies it is thus important to go beyond simplistic analytical distinctions such as public subsidies versus private investments and to scrutinise financial circuits as relevant

a statistical explanation for extreme bids in the house market this paper proposes a simple statistical explanation for the phenomenon of extreme bids during a boom the housing market regime switches from a single bidder to a multiple bidder environment the sale price in a multiple bidder auction is the maximum bid and the distribution of maximum bids contains a much higher proportion of extreme bids compared with the distribution of single bidder valuations while this theory does not preclude behavioural explanations of extreme bids it does demonstrate that a world free from strategic and idiosyncratic behaviour would not be a world free from extreme bids during boom periods therefore when gauging the impact of strategic or idiosyncratic behaviour either hypothetically or empirically one has to measure the effect against a baseline regime where extreme bids are inevitable not against a world that is free from extreme bids

undermining the financial basis of regions the spatial structure and implications of the uk pension fund system martin r and minns r 1995 undermining the financial basis of regions the spatial structure and implications of the uk pension fund system reg studies 29 125 144 regional growth theory and regional policy traditionally focus on the process of industrial development relatively little is known about the flows of money and financial capital that shape that development this paper examines the spatial organization and implications of the uk pension fund system one of the principal circuits of financial capital in the national economy it is shown how the great bulk of pension fund contributions that originate right across the various regions of the uk are channelled into and controlled by financial institutions in the south east of the country moreover those funds are then invested primarily back into companies and organizations located or headquartered in the south east this spatially centralized system pursues liquidity rather than productive investment and little of the money trickles down to

regional finance a survey the role of money and nancial markets in the regional matters 1 economy has been attracting increasing attention in we start with a review of the treatment of money recent years it has been a topic of interest for longer in regional economics and then turn to the much

globalisation and housing finance systems in advanced and transition economies globalisation is only the most recent manifestation of convergence theory this article shows how distinctive housing finance systems in the advanced economies contribute to distinctive housing systems with important social and economic implications it also suggests that the evidence from the european union confirms what can be derived from a priori reasoning that mobility of finance does not alter the nationally based components of the wider housing finance system hence even huge changes in the nature of intermediaries fail to alter the fundamental nature of the mortgage product combined with lack of any evidence to suggest that government support for home ownership is in general or irreversible retreat it is suggested that the former socialist transition countries have considerably more opportunity to shape their housing finance systems than might be suggested by convergence theory

giving birds a starting date the curious social solution to a water resource issue in the u s west abstract examining a natural resource management system we show that what first looks like rigid path dependency is actually stepped incremental change the theoretical question then arises of whether it is possible to predict when a natural resource governance system will follow such an incremental path of institutional change our investigation of the prior appropriation water rights system as administered in the state of wyoming reveals that mental models based on factors such as strong personal connections with administrators plus strong confidence in the system tend to favor incremental change we note that choosing incremental change is not without risk while systems that undertake wholesale and rapid change risk a good deal exposing themselves to a potential shower of unanticipated consequences systems that follow the path of incremental change also take risks incremental change may mean successful accommodation of new needs that demand attention or it may be too little too late ultimately allowing the pent up pressure of unmet needs to push the system over a threshold into collapse

finance business property and urban and regional development halbert l henneberry j and mouzakis f finance business property and urban and regional development regional studies compared with other factors of production the supply of business property and its role in urban and regional development has received comparatively little attention traditional analyses assume that the supply of such property responds to demand in a relatively unproblematic way however there is evidence that institutional structures and processes in the property and capital markets have produced regional imbalances in the quantity quality and price of business accommodation benefiting some places and handicapping others such imbalances are present to different degrees internationally and their characteristics and causes are similarly varied the special issue addresses this gap in knowledge

building cities on financial assets the financialisation of property markets and its implications for city governments in the paris city region the 2008 global financial meltdown has redirected attention to the entwinement of financial markets and the urban built environment against that background recent works in urban political economy have focused on how city governments support the rent maximisation strategies of landowners thereby reinforcing the increasing tendency to treat land as a financial asset harvey 1982 2006 however this perspective paradoxically understates the importance of market finance actors neglecting to demonstrate how in practice such financial investors who have been shown to adopt selective investment practices shape urban redevelopment projects in this article the role of financial investors is analysed through a case study of a large scale redevelopment project on the outskirts of the paris city region city of saint ouen the analysis of negotiations over urban design and economic development issues raised by property developers seeking to fashion commercial properties as investment assets reveals the unevenness of a local authority s ability to implement an agenda that potentially diverges from the expectations of financial investors accordingly given the growing importance of investors in the ownership of the built environment the article considers urban redevelopment as the outcome of power relations that originate in the circulation of investors expectations these expectations are met through translating market finance categories risk return and liquidity into elements of the urban fabric this bears substantial consequences for policy making given the current context of austerity as municipal authorities are increasingly constrained to rely on property markets urban redevelopment projects are thereby increasingly shaped to provide investment assets for financial investors

foreign ownership market structure and industrial performance brazil s electrical industry abstract using an industrial organization approach this article tests the hypothesis that the ownership of firms exerts an independent influence on industrial performance we compare the behavior of foreign and domestic firms in brazil s electrical industry in four areas the association of firms with particular types of domestic market structures their technology their trade conduct and their profitability regression analysis shows that tncs tend to produce in tightly organized differentiated oligopolies they generally employ a more capital intensive technology they import more per unit of sales but do not necessarily export more finally reported earnings of tncs are found not to be any higher than domestic firms but reported profits of all firms are positively related to the level of industrial concentration and product differentiation markets which tend to be the domain of tncs rather than domestic enterprises it is concluded that ownership is a strong variable of market structure in brazil s electrical industry and that the systematic effect of foreign ownership on industrial performance is not always helpful in attaining development objectives

the components of talent company size and financial centres in the european investment management industry clark g l the components of talent company size and financial centres in the european investment management industry regional studies as the centre for advanced financial services and having the complex array of services needed to invest beyond europe s borders london dominates the european financial services industry as in other global financial centres there is a premium on talented investment managers identified in the media as star performers investment companies rely on such employees for risk adjusted rates of return on the basis of asset and or style specific investment strategies while protecting their clients against the risks occasioned by market uncertainty drawing upon frameworks from organizational ecology this paper integrates the size of companies with the market for talent sectorally and geographically

dependence on foreign investment and economic growth in the third world estimates of the extent to which third world countries have experienced slower rates of growth than those in the industrialized west since i960 indicate a weak relation between initial wealth and subsequent economic growth that follows an inverted u shape pattern while the lowest growth rates are found among the poorest countries of the third world the highest growth rates are found not in the industrialized west but in the wealthiest third world countries drawing on contending arguments associated with modernization and dependency perspectives the relationship between foreign investment and growth within the third world is examined results undermine the idea that foreign investment inhibits growth suggesting instead that flows of foreign investment may facilitate growth especially among the initially wealthier countries of the third world

regulatory change corporate restructuring and the spatial development of the british financial sector marshall j n gentle c j s raybould s and coombes m 1992 regulatory change corporate restructuring and the spatial development of the british financial sector reg studies 26 453 467 the paper explores the dynamics of employment growth and change in the financial sector in the regions of britain during the 1980s complementing other work which has focused on international and corporate finance it focuses on personal financial markets the paper demonstrates the way in which regulatory change has initiated corporate diversification into new markets this reorganization has also included a round of innovation in new financial services and intensified competition in established personal sector markets restructuring has both intensified the concentration of the industry in the south and east of the country and promoted decentralization from london professional and managerial staff associated with the development of new services have been concentrated in the greater south east the rationaliza

economics and underdetermination a case study of urban land and housing economics underdetermination associated with the duhem quine thesis is a familiar if under researched theme in economics in the light of this we examine the development of urban land and housing economics through its cartesian dualistic delineation of theory and data the contemporary mainstream approach appears unable to circumvent the problem of underdetermination in effect it employs the strong version of duhem quine in its retention of the assumption of a single unitary competitive market and associated access space trade off conversely we highlight the affinity of ely s and the later columbia school s approach to pragmatists dewey and peirce which provides a more fruitful basis for explanation

critical survey the new geographical turn in economics some critical reflections over the past few years a new geographical economics has emerged focused on the spatial agglomeration of industry and the long run convergence of regional incomes several leading names are associated with this geographical turn including paul krugman michael porter robert barro and w brian arthur this new economic geography it is argued here is neither that new nor is it geography instead it is a reworking or re invention using recent developments in formal mathematical mainstream economics of traditional location theory and regional science as such it is quite opposed to and difficult to reconcile with the work on regional development and industrial agglomeration being carried out in economic geography proper

1992 and its impact on local and regional banking markets molyneux p 1989 1992 and its impact on local and regional banking markets reg studies 23 523 533 the aim of this paper is to examine how the structure performance and ownership characteristics of ec banking markets will influence the expansion strategies of large ec banks up to 1992 we will also examine the implied effect this will have on local and regional banking markets within the ec the emphasis focuses on large bank acquisition opportunities available up to 1992 we find that the majority of potential big banks acquisition targets are based in the uk germany france spain italy and luxembourg the limited big bank takeover opportunities available to banks will probably encourage them to establish niche business branch networks overseas it will also accelerate the current move of large banks to acquire small and medium sized regional banks across borders as well as to form joint ventures with institutions in other ec countries molyneux p 1989 1992 et son impact sur les marches banc

planning policy and retail property investment in the uk empirical evidence suggests that planning policies significantly impact on investment property market performance in the uk it is less clear however how information about the planning policy environment feeds into investment decision making this paper seeks to explore this issue it reports on interviews with the property investment community and focuses on the decision to invest in the retail sector the paper uses a six stage model of the investment decision making process as a framework for analysing the way in which concerns about policy impact on behaviour the results suggest that an understanding of the policy environment and the development of a relationship with local planning authorities are most important in the post acquisition asset management stage of the investment process the research also reveals variations in access to policy intelligence and that approaches to analysis of the likely effects of planning regimes vary with fund type and strategy

constructing a market performing theory the historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange this analysis of the history of the chicago board options exchange explores the performativity of economics a theme in economic sociology recently developed by callon economics was crucial to the creation of financial derivatives exchanges it helped remedy the drastic loss of legitimacy suffered by derivatives in the first half of the 20th century option pricing theory a crown jewel of neoclassical economics succeeded empirically not because it discovered preexisting price patterns but because markets changed in ways that made its assumptions more accurate and because the theory was used in arbitrage the performativity of economics however has limits and an emphasis on it needs to be combined with classic themes in economic sociology such as granovetterian embedding and the way in which exchanges can be cultures and moral communities in which collective action problems can be solved

institutions in economics the old and the new institutionalism 1 definitions and issues 2 formalism and anti formalism 3 individualism and holism 4 rationality and rule following 5 evolution and design 6 efficiency and reform 7 conflicts and complementarities

seasonality and cointegration of regional house prices in the uk the data generation process underlying regional house prices in the uk is investigated using new statistical tests it is found that causal flows tend to be northwards the south east rather than greater london acts as an exogenous price determinator of the other regions in the south the midland regions have a great influence on prices in the north and flows through the east midlands are characterised by bi directional causality these results are largely independent of assumptions made about the data generation process and tests of these assumptions have low power in any case there are also similarities between this causality and migration patterns particularly in the south of england

institutional path dependence in climate adaptation coman s some unsettled problems of irrigation districts that emerged in the american west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in response to aridity to facilitate agricultural water delivery use and trade raise the transaction costs today of water markets these markets are vital for smooth reallocation of water to higher valued uses elsewhere in the economy and for flexible response to greater hydrological uncertainty this institutional path dependence illustrates how past arrangements to meet conditions of the time constrain contemporary economic opportunities they cannot be easily significantly modified or replaced ex post