Collaborative Research: A Strategic Approach to Local Economic Development

现有的城市政治文献将发展政策分为三种类型：补贴发展的区位激励；提供激励但附加条件的渐进式发展政策；以及增长管理限制。与大多数现有工作孤立地考察一种或至多两种政策类型不同，研究人员将增长政策视为跨越这些类型的连续体，基于发展的成本和收益在公共和私人参与者之间的分配。根据所使用的政策工具、特许权和采掘量的组合，城市与私营部门谈判达成的具体协议可能出现在这一连续体上的任何一点。通过使用讨价还价的视角，他们可以通过专注于增加城市相对议价能力的因素--使城市能够从企业那里榨取利益，或者迫使城市提供让步以吸引增长--来统一这些不同的城市增长问题的方法。将纳什讨价还价模型应用于开发交易也可以将先前开发研究的见解纳入更严格的理论框架，从而产生非常具体的经验规范。城市开发的竞争体现在城市和公司外部选择的相对价值上--如果谈判达成的交易失败，双方都将获得替代选择。伦敦金融城讨价还价的能力将取决于它对不同企业的内在吸引力，这决定了它在交易中应该接受的最低价值；它需要减少经济或财政问题，这决定了它的时间偏好；以及谈判交易的政治参与者的风险厌恶。确定城市议价能力的来源还将导致就如何构建政府机构和总体发展政策，以提高城市追求短期和长期发展目标的能力提出政策建议。调查人员还扩展了这一方法，以解决随着时间的推移，与不同公司反复进行的讨价还价游戏。这一扩展使人们能够评估城市能否树立“硬”或“软”的声誉，在发展政策上相当于发展缓慢或促进增长的地区。通过实证分析和理论建模对这种讨价还价方法进行了研究。该模型的预测是用从12个选定的大都市地区内所有超过1万人的地方的全国发展官员调查收集的数据来检验的。这项调查收集了最近两笔谈判达成的区位激励交易的信息。这有助于衡量谈判模式的结果--谈判协议的价值。关于特定公司的信息是从档案来源收集的，并与数据集中的讨价还价结果相匹配。有关城市政治、财政和经济特征的其他信息被合并到最终数据集中。在12个大都市地区的实地调查增加了实际谈判过程的细节和城市记录中的数据。此外，对参与制定发展政策和开展发展谈判的官员的采访为发展谈判的案例分析提供了基础。这项研究的预期成果代表了城市政治领域的重大理论和方法进步，也为城市官员改善对发展目标的追求提供了一个应用框架。鉴于对城市政治和公共政策领域问题的正式建模方法一直有限，这项研究产生的工作有可能在将新的方法方法扩展到这些领域方面具有开创性意义。

The existing urban politics literature has classified development policies into three types: location incentives that subsidize development; progressive development policies that provide incentives but with strings attached; and growth management restrictions. Unlike most of this extant work which has examined one or at most two of the policy types in isolation, the researchers treat growth policy as a continuum across these types, based on the distribution of the costs and benefits of development among pubic and private actors. The specific deals that cities negotiated with private actors can fall at any point on this continuum, based on the combination of policy instruments used, the concessions and extractions negotiated. Use of the bargaining perspective allows them to unite these separate approaches to city growth issues by focusing on the factors that increase a city's relative bargaining power -- enabling it to make extract benefits from firms or forcing it to provide concessions to attract growth. Applying the Nash bargaining model to development deals also can incorporate insights from previous development research within a more rigorous theoretical framework that leads to a very specific empirical specification. City competition for development is captured by the relative values of the city's and the firm's outside options -- the alternatives each would get if the negotiated deal fell through. City bargaining power will depend on its inherent attractiveness to different businesses, which determines the minimum value it should accept in a deal; its need to reduce economic or fiscal problems, which determines its time preference, and the risk aversion of the political actors negotiating the deal. Identifying the sources of the city's bargaining power will also lead to policy recommendations on how government institutions and general development policies can be structured to improve the city's ability to pursue both short term and long term development goals. The investigators also extend this approach to address repeated play of the bargaining game with different firms over time. This extension permits evaluation of the possibility that cities can develop a reputation as a 'tough' or 'soft' agent, equivalent in development policy to slow- or pro-growth areas. This bargaining approach is investigated through empirical analysis and theoretical modeling. Predictions of the model are tested with data collected from a national survey of development officials in all incorporated places over 10,000 within 12 selected metropolitan areas. The survey gathers information on the two most recent negotiated location incentives deals. This facilitates the measurement of the outcome of the bargaining model-the value of the negotiated agreements. Information on specific firms is collected from archival sources, and matched to bargaining outcomes in the data set. Additional information on city political, fiscal and economic characteristics are merged into the final data set. Fieldwork in the 12 metropolitan areas add details about the negotiation process in practice and data from city records. In addition, interviews with officials involved in formulating development policy and carrying out development negotiations provides the basis for case analyses of development negotiation.The anticipated products of this research represent significant theoretical and methodological advances in the urban politics field, as well as an applied framework for city officials to improve pursuit of their development goals. Given that formal modeling approaches to questions in the urban politics and public policy fields have been limited, the work resulting from this research has the potential to be groundbreaking in its extension of new methodological approaches to these fields.