Counties and cities in Virginia exhibit distinct regional patterns of growth. While some regions are amongst the fastest growing of any in the nation, other regions have experienced slow or even negative rates of growth in recent decades. To better understand growth in Virginia in recent decades, this thesis presents and estimates an empirical model that will help determine which factors have had the greatest influence on the various components of growth. These components include migration, natural increase (births minus deaths) and employment growth. The results suggest that overall growth was most positively associated with areas of diffuse but high population, as found in many peri-urban localities. Results also indicate that high property taxes have had a strong negative influence upon growth in recent decades. For policy makers and planners in rapidly growing regions, these results indicate that development ordinances that restrict growth to more densely populated areas could effectively slow rates of rapid growth. For slow growth regions, these results indicate that maintenance of low living costs to attract migrants and a diversified employment base may be an effective means to stimulate growth. / Master of Science

Includes bibliographical references / This thesis focuses on the effects and causes of exchange rate volatility in South Africa. These issues are analysed in three stand-alone but related papers. The first paper (Chapter 2) investigates the impact of real exchange rate volatility on employment growth in the manufacturing sector. The study contributes to the literature on the employment effects of exchange rate volatility in emerging markets given limited studies. This is done by using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) counteraction approach which is able to estimate an error correction form of the model for the variables under investigation. This enables one to analyse the relationship between exchange rate volatility and employment growth. The advantage of this approach is that it performs better in small samples and works well even when the underlying variables are integrated of different orders. Employing quarterly time series data for the period 1995 . 2010, the analysis shows that real exchange rate volatility has a significant contractionary effect on manufacturing employment growth. The study also provides evidence that exchange rate level, output, wages and interest rates have significant effects on manufacturing employment growth. The results suggest that the government can reduce the adverse effects of exchange rate volatility on manufacturing by adopting macroeconomic policies that minimise exchange rate volatility and policies that promote employment creation, for instance, less restrictive policies given that the results show that an increase in interest rates leads to a decline in employment. Coming up with macroeconomic policies that minimise exchange rate volatility requires the knowledge of the causes of exchange rate volatility. As a result, the second paper (Chapter 3) investigates the determinants of exchange rate volatility in South Africa. Few studies investigate the determinants of rand volatility (Arezki, Dumitrescu, Freytag & Quintyn 2014, Farrell 2001). This study contributes to the literature by finding the sources of rand volatility using output volatility, money supply volatility, foreign reverses volatility, commodity price volatility, openness and a dummy for capital account liberalisation as explanatory variables. This is done using GARCH models for the period 1986- 2013 employing monthly time series data. The advantage of GARCH models is that they are able to model and forecast time-varying variance given that the exchange rate behaves similarly to other asset prices, for example, stock prices. The study tests the hypothesis that economic openness leads to a reduction in exchange rate volatility following Hau's (2002) modifications of the New Open Macroeconomics model of Obstfeld & Rogoff (1995, 1996). South Africa is a good case study following the liberalisation of the capital account in March 1995. The results show that switching to a coating exchange rate regime has a significant positive effect on exchange rate volatility. That is, it increases exchange rate volatility. The results also show that trade openness reduces exchange rate volatility using the bilateral exchange rate. The results also show that output, commodity prices, money supply and foreign reserves volatilities significantly influences exchange rate volatility. The study also shows that real factors (commodity prices, output and openness) have relatively larger effects on exchange rate volatility compared to monetary factors. The third paper (Chapter 4) analyses the short run behaviour of the South African rand using daily data. The study contributes to the literature on the causes of exchange rate movements in several ways. First, it uses an event studies approach a la Campbell, Lo & MacKinlay (1997) to answer two research questions. First, what is the impact of South Africa's monetary policy announcements on the rand? Second, what is the impact of South African political events on the rand? The advantage of event studies is that they are able to quantify systematically the abnormal or unexpected impact of an economic or political event on asset prices like the exchange rate. Second, the study focuses on an emerging market given that most studies have mainly focused on developed economies. Third, few studies that use event studies in South Africa focus on stock market reaction to announcements. The results find 8 out of 12 significant cumulative abnormal returns for monetary policy announcements. This suggests that the rand is not only influenced by demand and supply flows but also by news. The study also finds significant cumulative abnormal returns for all the three exchange rates following the Marikana massacre on 16 August 2012 and the release of Nelson Mandela banknotes on 6 November 2012. The ANC elective conference only has significant cumulative abnormal returns using the Rand/US dollar in 2007 and 2012.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Jeffrey M. Peterson / State and local economic development policies are often created with the goal of stimulating local economic activity through employment growth. The success of these policies is commonly measured by the number of jobs they create. Because labor markets are not bound by county lines, commuting and migration are important factors to consider when measuring employment growth in a region. This study used county-level data from the 2000 Census to predict labor force participation, unemployment, in-commuting, and out-commuting. The model was estimated using Ordinary Least Squares regression and was simulated to predict changes in labor force, unemployment and commuting as a result of a change in employment for all 105 Kansas counties. An increase in employment was found to increase the labor force participation, in-commuting, and unemployment, while decreasing the number of out-commuters. The increase in in-commuting causes many of the economic benefits expected to accrue to the county where the job growth occurred to be essentially exported to the county where the in-commuters live. Failure to account for the proportion of new jobs filled by in-commuters would lead to significant over estimations of local impacts of employment growth. These results suggest that regional coordination of economic development policies, through the use of tools such as tax-base sharing, would provide substantial gains to otherwise competing local governments.

Studies conducted for the US have found a positive effect of human capital endowments on employment growth, with human capital endowments diverging at the same time. In contrast, studies for European countries have found convergence of human capital endowments. This paper tests these relationships for 99 Austrian districts for the observation period 1971-2011 by estimating how the presence of high-skilled employment affects total, low-skilled and high-skilled employment growth. To this end, OLS, fixed effects and first difference regressions are estimated. The results show continuous convergence of high-skilled employment which, however, slowed downed significantly since the 1990s. In contrast to previous studies, evidence for positive effects of high-skilled on total and low-skilled employment is only weak and varies over time. Furthermore, the results show that total and high-skilled employment in suburban areas grew faster than in other regions, while districts which bordered the Eastern Bloc were disadvantaged. Nevertheless, spatial neighbourhood effects within Austria are only weak. (authors' abstract) / Series: Working Papers in Regional Science

The paper analyses the relationship between succession and firm performance. Applying a non-parametric matching approach on a panel of roughly 4,000 Austrian family firms we evaluate the impact of past succession as well as future succession plans on employment growth. Analysing succession plans, we do not find a 'shadow of succession' effect. No significant difference in employment growth is found between firms that plan to transfer the firm in the next ten years and those who do not. In contrast, past succession exerts a significant and positive employment growth effect which becomes stronger over time. Thus, our findings provide support for the existence of a positive employment shadow after a transfer, whereas the shadow of succession hypothesis has to be rejected prior to transition. / Series: Discussion Papers SFB International Tax Coordination

In the last decades, small firms have accounted for a disproportionately large share of new jobs. Using data from 1993 to 2009, the concern of this thesis is to examine regional differences in employment growth in Sweden, with  a focus at the role of small firms. The author employs findings from previous studies and theoretical discussions on advantages and disadvantages of small firms to derive a number of variables to use in two multiple regression models on regional employment growth, one for the period 1993-2001 and one for the period 2001-2009. The results show that, unlike increases of well educated workers and the population growth, increases in small firm employment is significant in explaining employment growth in both periods, with a positive relationship. For both periods, changes in small firms’ share of employment is not significant in explaining employment growth. Although many new jobs have been generated in service industries, changes in the service sectors’ share of employment is highly insignificant as an explanatory variable for employment growth. Moreover, an increased share of highly educated workers is negatively related to employment growth.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-04-12T12:30:10Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2170875 bytes, checksum: 2600a76d732d427977ff40db7a7e482b (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-12T12:30:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 2170875 bytes, checksum: 2600a76d732d427977ff40db7a7e482b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-02-26 / From two independent experiments, this thesis aimed to investigate the spatial concentration of employment of clothing and leather footwear and municipalities in the Brazilian Northeast sectors. To achieve this goal, broke the theoretical foundation of the New Economic Geography of the spatial concentration of productive activities generate benefits for local economic agents. The first trial, which is descriptive in nature, used the Spatial Analysis of Settlement for the identification and verification spatial evolution of clusters of two productive sectors between 1997 and 2012. The results suggest that the clothing industry has spatial concentration of productive clusters in the states of Pernambuco, Ceara and Rio Grande do Norte. The leather and footwear sector, in turn, is more concentrated in the states of Ceara and Bahia. Moreover, we perceive spatial spillover of clusters in the two sectors between the municipalities in the study period. The second essay, in turn, aimed to test from the marshallian externalities horizontal clustering of employment of micro, small and medium enterprises in the sectors for municipalities in the region between 2002 and 2012. For this, was used the spatial model proposed by Fingleton, Igliori and Moore (2005), which tests the explanatory variables of sectoral employment growth of micro, small and medium enterprises controlling estimates of supply and demand, isolating the effect of the initial intensity of the cluster, as well as possible effects of stage of congestion. The results suggest that there is a horizontal clustering in the clothing sector. Leather and footwear, on the other hand, seems to be no such clustering. / A partir de dois ensaios independentes, esta dissertação procurou verificar a concentração espacial do emprego dos setores de confecções e de couros e calçados nos municípios do Nordeste. Para atingir este objetivo, partiu-se da fundamentação teórica da Nova Geografia Econômica de que a concentração espacial das atividades produtivas gera efeitos benéficos para os agentes econômicos locais. O primeiro ensaio, que é de caráter descritivo, utilizou a Análise Espacial de Concentração para a identificação e verificação da evolução espacial dos clusters produtivos dos dois setores entre 1997 e 2012. Os resultados encontrados sugerem que o setor de confecções apresenta concentração espacial dos clusters produtivos nos Estados de Pernambuco, Ceará e Rio Grande do Norte. O setor de couros e calçados, por sua vez, apresenta maior concentração nos Estados do Ceará e da Bahia. Além disso, percebe-se transbordamento espacial dos clusters nos dois setores entre os municípios no período em estudo. O segundo ensaio, por sua vez, objetivou testar, a partir das externalidades marshallianas, a clusterização horizontal do emprego das micros, pequenas e médias empresas dos setores para os municípios da região entre 2002 e 2012. Para isso, foi utilizado o modelo espacial proposto por Fingleton, Igliori e Moore (2005), que testa variáveis explicativas do crescimento do emprego setorial das micros, pequenas e médias empresas controlando as estimativas da oferta e da demanda, isolando o efeito da intensidade inicial do cluster, bem como possível estágio de efeitos de congestão. Os resultados encontrados sugerem que há uma clusterização horizontal no setor de confecções. Em couros e calçados, por outro lado, parece não haver tal clusterização.

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The paper analyses the relationship between succession and firm performance. Using a unique panel data set on a sample of roughly 4,000 Austrian family firms we examine empirically the impact of past succession as well as future succession plans on employment growth and investment behaviour. Analysing succession plans, we do not find a 'shadow of succession' effect. No significant difference in employment growth and investment behaviour is found between firms that plan to transfer the firm in the next ten years and those who do not. In contrast, past succession exerts a significant and positive employment growth effect which becomes stronger over time. The impact of past succession on investments is also positive but not significantly different from zero. Thus, our findings provide support for the existence of a positive employment shadow after a transfer, whereas the shadow of succession hypothesis has to be rejected prior to transition. (author's abstract) / Series: Discussion Papers SFB International Tax Coordination