Özge Öner

Retail City: The Relationship between Place Attractiveness and Accessibility to Shops

ABSTRACT Retail city: the relationship between place attractiveness and accessibility to shops. Spatial Economic Analysis. This paper explores the role of retailers as an urban amenity. Using data for Swedish rural and city municipalities for 2002–08, ‘accessibility-to-shops’ measures are constructed for the shops in the municipalities and the hosting regions separately to examine the relationship between consumption possibilities and place attractiveness in a spatial continuum. Place attractiveness is proxied by a Q ratio for Swedish housing investment based on Tobin’s Q. Access to stores within municipal market boundaries is found to be relevant for the place attractiveness of city municipalities, whereas no such relationship is evident for rural municipalities.

Dummy variables vs. category-wise models

Empirical research frequently involves regression analysis with binary categorical variables, which are traditionally handled through dummy explanatory variables. This paper argues that separate category-wise models may provide a more logical and comprehensive tool for analysing data with binary categories. Exploring different aspects of both methods, we contrast the two with a Monte Carlo simulation and an empirical example to provide a practical insight.

Which retail services are co-located?

Purpose – Which retail services are co-located in space? Is it possible to categorize retail stores of different kinds with respect to their location pattern? Acknowledging the spatial dependency b ...

Innovation in the hospitality industry: Firm or location?

The hospitality industry is a rapidly growing revenue generator in many countries and is becoming economically important for generating employment and for integrating of immigrants into the labor market. As an industry where firms face fierce competition, it is important for the firms to maintain their competitiveness by distinguishing themselves from others through continuous improvements and innovations. In this article, we investigate the determinants of innovation in the hospitality industry by analyzing survey data gathered from over 900 firms in Sweden. In the analysis, we differentiate between firm-specific and location-specific features. We conclude that the most important characteristics that explain innovation lie within the firm itself, not the location. These results provide important insights regarding firm- versus location-placed innovation policies.

Location of leisure: the New Economic Geography of leisure services

Abstract Understanding more about the geographic location of leisure services is an important quest for research. For a long time now in developed economies, almost all employment growth is occurring within the service sector. In this sector, leisure services are fast growers. This means that the location of these services is important for economic growth and for employment opportunities of local market areas. Regional policy-makers time and again highlight these sectors as future engines of growth. This paper investigates the role of local demand in determining the availability and the scale of various types of leisure services. The analysis is motivated by observed regularities that indicate large and persistent interregional differences in the location and growth of leisure services. Based on a New Economic Geography framework, we investigate the role of local and regional demand for the size of leisure services in geographically separate markets in Sweden. We use data for 290 Swedish municipalities for the period 2002–2013 and run year-municipality fixed-effects regressions. Our main findings suggest a strong dependency on local demand, and less on the demand originating from other regions.

On regression modelling with dummy variables versus separate regressions per group: comment on Holgersson et al

On regression modelling with dummy variables versus separate regressions per group : comment on Holgersson et al.

Retail Productivity: Investigating the Influence of Market Size and Regional Hierarchy

This paper investigates the determinants of the productivity of independent retail stores in Sweden by focusing on the impact of market size and regional hierarchy while controlling for several store and employee characteristics over time. The analysis utilizes Swedish store-level data for the years 2002-2008. To capture the urban-periphery interaction in retail markets, the analysis (i) uses an accessible market potential measure, which captures the impact of the potential demand both in close proximity in the region, and from outside the region separately, and (ii) investigates the stores that are located in central and non-central markets respectively. The results show an approximately 10 percent higher productivity premium associated with the market size in close proximity for centrally located independent stores, whereas regional market size is found to play an equally important role for both stores located in central markets and stores located in peripheral markets. The findings also show that employee characteristics do not contribute to the productivity of stores in central markets but that small but significant productivity returns are captured for stores located in peripheral markets. The differences in the impact arising from the market potential measures highlight the importance of taking the spatial continuum and regional hierarchy into account in an examination of the market size–productivity relationship for retailers.