Research

I am an economic and population geographer with strong ties to urban geography and urban economics. My research is in the area of regional economic development, which I approach from a relational perspective with a focus on inequality between regions and people. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, my work examines how migration, globalization and institutions shape the relationships between actors, their behavior and their patterns of interaction, in ways that promote (or do not promote) economic development.

Migration and regional economic development: how do patterns of migration shape and respond to urban, neighborhood and individual-level economic contexts?

Destination Locations for Inter-Regional Movers 2017

LA = Los Angeles, SF = San Francisco, SEA = Seattle, NY = New York and DC = Washington, DC

In the U.S., there is increasing scholarly and public concern that the prohibitively high cost-of-living in ‘superstar cities’ might be displacing people into entirely new city-regions. In particular, there is the prospect that low-income and other historically disadvantaged residents might be getting pushed out of these cities. In order to unpack what is occurring with respect to migration out of large expensive metros, I examine who is moving out of these cities in the U.S. and where they are going. Using a number of sophisticated statistical methodologies, I find that lower socioeconomic status households are more likely to leave large expensive U.S. cities, though there appears tobe substantial heterogeneity in the motivations underlying this out-migration. Migration out of these cities may thus be more complex than simply the push of high cost-of-living. It is suggested that policymakers ought to focus on the negative impacts of the high cost-of-living for households that remain within these labor markets, rather than attempt to prevent others from moving out altogether. This paper is currently under review.

Diversity of U.S. Census Tracts 2017

This paper engages with a growing body of research demonstrating a robust positive relationship between urban immigrant diversity in the U.S. and worker productivity, with causation running in that order. I argue the exact mechanism(s) that drive the relationship between diversity and productivity at the urban level are underexplored in extant research. Drawing on research in regional economic development, migration studies, demography and social psychology, I describe four potential mechanisms that might drive the relationship between immigrant diversity and productivity at the urban level. I test for the existence of each with a pseudo panel and fixed effects OLS regressions across U.S. MSAs between 2011 and 2017. The results suggest that at the urban level, diversity enhances productivity through what I call “exposure effects” and “interaction and learning,” wherein workers become more productive and more creative through exposure to new cultures and ways of thinking and through joint problem solving. These results suggest that positive externalities arise when coupling rising immigrant diversity with opportunities for social integration of diverse individuals. This paper is under review.

Globalization and regional economic development: how has global economic integration over the last 40 years reshaped the geography of economic opportunity across the U.S.?

Simple Regressions of Median Income and Outward and Inward Greenfield Foreign-Direct Investments for U.S. CSAs

This paper challenges populist views of outward foreign-direct investments (OFDIs) that suggest they move prosperity abroad, by building a model which suggests OFDIs support urban-regional income levels due to (i) labor, (ii) knowledge and (iii) multiplier, spillover and intermediate input effects. In a panel study of median incomes in U.S. urban regions between 2005 and 2013, with controls for a number of other variables that elevate regional income levels, it finds strong support that greenfield OFDIs act as a catalyst of urban-regional income development. There is some indication that OFDIs also increase inequalities within urban regions by providing larger benefits to workers at the top of the education distribution, thus increasing inequality though through a different mechanism than populists would suggest (i.e. hurting workers at the bottom of the education distribution).

Bathelt, H.* & Buchholz, M.* (2019). Outward Foreign-Direct Investments as a Catalyst of Urban-Regional Income Development? Evidence from the United States. Economic Geography, 95(5): 442-466.
*Listed alphabetically - both authors contributed equally to this paper

Gini Coefficients for Median Wage and Salary Income Levels Across U.S. Labor Markets (CSAs) 1969-2017

This paper engages with a body of work demonstrating rising inequality in average incomes between U.S. cities since the 1980s. Research seeking to explain this shift has focused on the ways in which technological change and trade have had disproportionately negative effects on some cities and positive ones on others. This paper explores whether the global connectivity of firms within cities (measured by outward foreign-direct investments or OFDIs), has contributed to income divergence across U.S. cities. It first argues that OFDIs positively contribute to average income levels in home cities through labor, knowledge, multiplier and trade effects. It then suggests that regional income levels and OFDIs are subject to a virtuous co-evolutionary process for high-income cities while having weaker, potentially vicious, effects for cities at the bottom of the income distribution. This argument is tested with a combination of panel fixed effects regressions and quantile regressions. The key finding is that while OFDIs have a positive effect on regional income levels at the mean, the magnitude of their effect is largest for cities with incomes around the 60th to 80th percentiles of the income distribution. This suggests that higher income cities gain the most when continuing to engage in OFDIs, thus enabling them to further their pre-existing lead.

Buchholz, M., Bathelt, H. & Cantwell J. (2020). Income divergence and global connectivity of U.S. urban regions. Forthcoming in the Journal of International Business Policy.

Institutions and regional economic development: what are institutions and what role do they play in economic development?

"eskapo"by kendrak is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Economic geographers have extensively acknowledged the importance of the cultural industries to many regional economies and have begun to establish that these industries have economically important interactions with local “underground scenes.” Less well known however is how these scenes themselves develop. Based on archival research on zines, or small circulation independently produced magazines, I illustrate how the 1980s San Francisco Bay Area punk rock scene was a vibrant cultural community. I demonstrate how what was once an underground scene also became a commercialized one, with bands like Green Day and Rancid becoming hugely popular in the 1990s “wave” or growth of the genre. I develop a framework for understanding the growth of local scenes, arguing that the essential ingredients are a robust mix of organizations, institutions and networks. Of particular importance are institutional practices of frequent communication and inclusivity and networks on both local and extra local scales.

Buchholz, M. (2019). Organizations, Institutions and Networks in Local Scenes: The Growth of San Francisco Punk Rock. Geoforum, 103: 158-166.