Three papers in regional economics: energy productivity convergence, water resource planning, and workforce occupation-industry dynamics
type: CreativeWork
description: "This dissertation research consists of three papers that use the perspectives of regional economics to examine three key engines of economic growth -- technology, natural resource and human capital, by taking spatial heterogeneities and relationships into consideration. The first paper empirically tests the trade-facilitated technology spillovers in the convergence of energy productivities at the disaggregated manufacturing sectors across European Union (EU) countries. The second paper develops a multi-objective non-linear optimization model to simulate the tradeoffs between streamflow restoration and economic welfare loss in a Chicago suburban county - McHenry County. The third paper establishes a dynamic modeling framework to explore the occupation-industry linkages and decipher an array of labor market signals. The first paper (chapter 2) differs from most previous empirical convergence studies in the economic growth literature by considering a relatively high degree of sectoral detail - 10 NACE (classification of economic activities in the European community) manufacturing sectors. To account for potential spatial heterogeneity and dependence in regional growth, this chapter adopts a spatial version of energy productivity equation, and extends the single equation cross-sectional setting to time series observations of cross-sectional setting. It reformulates the spatial convergence regression equations into a spatial panel data model with individual (country & industry) effects and uses the panel data procedure for estimation. Under the β-convergence spatial panel-data approach, the estimated coefficients of β are almost all negative and statistically significant. This shows EU countries with low starting energy productivity witness relatively faster growth of energy productivity, and former Eastern-bloc EU countries are catching up to more advanced economies in energy efficiency levels. The estimation results present evidence that energy productivity convergenc…
abstract: "This dissertation research consists of three papers that use the perspectives of regional economics to examine three key engines of economic growth -- technology, natural resource and human capital, by taking spatial heterogeneities and relationships into consideration. The first paper empirically tests the trade-facilitated technology spillovers in the convergence of energy productivities at the disaggregated manufacturing sectors across European Union (EU) countries. The second paper develops a multi-objective non-linear optimization model to simulate the tradeoffs between streamflow restoration and economic welfare loss in a Chicago suburban county - McHenry County. The third paper establishes a dynamic modeling framework to explore the occupation-industry linkages and decipher an array of labor market signals. The first paper (chapter 2) differs from most previous empirical convergence studies in the economic growth literature by considering a relatively high degree of sectoral detail - 10 NACE (classification of economic activities in the European community) manufacturing sectors. To account for potential spatial heterogeneity and dependence in regional growth, this chapter adopts a spatial version of energy productivity equation, and extends the single equation cross-sectional setting to time series observations of cross-sectional setting. It reformulates the spatial convergence regression equations into a spatial panel data model with individual (country & industry) effects and uses the panel data procedure for estimation. Under the β-convergence spatial panel-data approach, the estimated coefficients of β are almost all negative and statistically significant. This shows EU countries with low starting energy productivity witness relatively faster growth of energy productivity, and former Eastern-bloc EU countries are catching up to more advanced economies in energy efficiency levels. The estimation results present evidence that energy productivity convergenc…
author: Wan, Jun
language: en
keywords: Spatial Panel Econometrics, Energy Productivity, Multi-Objective Optimization, Groundwater Planning, Occupational Training, Labor Market Dynamics
date published: 2012-02-01T00:55:45Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:25:27Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/29566