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Silicon Valley conjures images of leading edge technology. Las Vegas makes one think of gambling and entertainment. Hollywood stands for the movie industry. Making those connections between cities and their key industries is automatic in most people’s minds because of the high concentrations of specific industry areas in each of those cities. Economists call this phenomenon industrial agglomeration, and policymakers have touted it as a proven strategy for developing local economies. Even though agglomeration has existed for years, researchers and policy makers still find it challenging to measure it, often being forced to make assumptions about the statistical distribution of the index used for measurement. But Zheng Tian, Graduate Research Assistant at the Regional Research Institute and Ph.D. candidate in Economics, West Virginia University, was not deterred. Delving into the available literature, Tian fashioned a quantitative technique that would provide an index of agglomeration that does not depend on assumptions regarding statistical distribution. He describes his findings in his research paper, “Measuring Agglomeration Using the Standardized Location Quotient with a Bootstrap Method.” And his paper has won him the 2012 M. Jarvin Emerson Student Paper Competition award, which will be presented to him this upcoming June at the Mid-Continent Regional Science Association conference being held in Bloomington, MN.For more information, click here. Summer Course in Spatial Econometrics Drs. Donald J. Lacombe and Gianfranco Piras, acknowledged leaders in both Bayesian and classical spatial econometrics, are once again teaching a summer course in Spatial Econometrics, which is a subfield of econometrics that incorporates geographic space in regression models for cross-sectional and panel data. For more information… |
Obesity Concerns? Choose to Change According to the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health, 18.5% of kindergarteners, 22.1 % of second graders, and 29.6% of fifth graders in West Virginia were obese. And West Virginia University has stepped in to bolster the state’s fight to promote healthy eating and physical activity behaviors. Through a five-year, multi-million dollar grant funded through the USDA, researchers at the university plan to empower parents, teachers, students, and community members by teaching them ways to make home, school, and community environments child healthy. The study will follow preschool children and their families through second grade to tract the program’s effectiveness.
Most of us find thinking and talking about garbage unpleasant. But for Christa D. Jensen, a Regional Research Institute (RRI) graduate research fellow, garbage—particularly hazardous waste— is a welcomed subject that infiltrates and dominates most of her waking thoughts. This drive to examine and make sense of the various facets of hazardous waste is surely one of the reasons she was honored this past March at the 51st Southern Regional Science Association Meeting held in Charlotte, NC. Jensen’s excellence in scholarly work in regional science was recognized by a panel of academicians and researchers who chose her paper as the winning entry for the 2012 Barry M. Moriarty Student Paper Award. Her paper, “Examining Sub-national Waste Flows in the United Kingdom: A Spatial Interaction Approach” investigates the relationships that exist within the origin-destination flows of hazardous waste. For more …. New Additions to Web Book A new book has been added to RRI’s Web Book of Regional Science. This classic is titled Optimal Location of Facilities and is authored by Dr. Gerard Rushton, Geograpy Department at the University of Iowa. William Schaffer’s book, Regional Impact Models, has now been translated into Farsi through the efforts of Majid Dehghanizadeh, a researcher with the Jahad Daneshgahi Academic Institute of Yazd in Iran.
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Regional Research Institute
