Raising the bar (2)

In this editorial we summarise and comment on the papers published in issue 11.2 so as to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends. The first paper analyses which regions in Europe were resilient to the great Recession and which ones were not. The second and the third develop a competing-destinations gravity model to explain respectively which hospitals people go to depending on their residential location and which regions migrants go to on entering Europe. The fourth proposes a Bayesian approach to obtain likely values if data on certain spatial units are missing. Finally, the last paper tries to explain the spreading of people in sprawling cities.