Growth of City Regions and Bank Branch Localization

Abstract

Current research in regional science focuses on the relationships between production factors and their impact on the overall product of cities, as well as topics dealing with the contribution of different city sizes to the economic growth. However, the ongoing process of international financialization tightly linked to access to finance gains on importance as the financial sector serves as a conduit for capital transformation in space. This article examines the economic growth of Slovak city regions and estimates the effect of access to finance measured by bank branches availability in these regions, once controlling for the standard impact of production factors. We construct non-overlapping three 5-years periods panel for more than 60 Slovak urban regions and combine it with data on bank branches localization on the county level and for major domestic commercial banks. The standard Cobb-Douglas production function is utilized with regional output calculated for firms with more than 20 employees and measures of physical and quantity and quality of human capital as conditioning variables. The characteristics of individual banks with bank branches located inside the city regions are included in order to investigate quality effect of financialization process. In order to control for time-invariant region-specific effect we use fixed effect panel model. Potential endogeneity issue between regional productivity and bank branch localization is addressed by the use of IV-2SLS estimator.