Alternative measure of border effects across regions: Ripley's K‐function method

This study uses Ripley's K‐function to examine the diversity in cross‐region labor mobility under various border effects from heterogeneous policies. Based on manufacturing labour data for Chinese cities, we emphasize the importance of border effects in the formation of regional integration with a Ripley's K‐function analysis. The statistical measures indicate that the amount of labour mobility involves distance‐decay effects of the border. However, the variety in the distance‐decay of the border effects differs considerably between each pair of adjacent regions. For this reason, transport costs caused by natural or economic geography probably explained most of the differences in border effects.