Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

Airbnb and other home-sharing platforms have been facing increasing regulation over the past years, mainly in the form of restricting short-term rentals through day caps. In contrast, as one of the first countries in the world, Denmark applied a collaborative strategy: In 2018, the government negotiated an agreement with Airbnb about the transmission of income data from the platform to the tax agency. We analyze how this data-sharing agreement affected hosts' behavior on the platform, using a difference-in-differences approach with Sweden as a counterfactual. We find that the agreement reduced hosts’ propensity to list property on the platform by 14%, while increasing listing prices by 11%. Our results indicate that platform exits were mostly limited to single-property hosts. In contrast, hosts with many properties and those in areas with initially low Airbnb penetration made their rental objects more often available and managed to increase the number of bookings. Overall, the findings imply that the data-sharing agreement not only helped to increase tax compliance but also led to a commercialization and spatial re-organization of short-term renting in Denmark.

This paper examines the impact of environmental regulation on the local labor markets by exploiting China’s first air pollution regulation as a natural experiment. The identification strategy uses a novel instrumental variable based on engineering considerations related to coal-burning activities. The analysis shows that the pollution regulation has led to employment decline in the targeted prefectures and sectors, mainly through the channel of firm exits. Furthermore, detailed census data with worker characteristics are used to examine the skill heterogeneity and the regulation-induced spatial transition costs.

Using retail property transaction data and e-retailers’ fulfillment center openings from 2010 to 2014, we find that e-commerce expansion–measured by e-retailers’ fulfillment center openings–increases retail property values by 5.2% in counties with fulfillment center openings compared to similar counties with no openings. The effect appears in year two following the fulfillment center opening and persists through year five. This indicates a persistent divergence in retail property prices between the treatment and control groups. The increase in retail property values is accompanied by a significant boost in employment, wages, and business establishments in the transportation and warehousing sector, supporting the income channel hypothesis. However, we find limited evidence for the substitution channels. Notably, the impact is more pronounced in areas where fulfillment center workers are likely to reside.

To ease pressure from the aging population, the Chinese government implemented a two-child policy for couples where either the husband or the wife is from a single-child family in 2014. Using this policy as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that housing booms inhibit the potential desire for more children. A one-standard-deviation increase in the housing price-income ratio decreases the probability of migrant couples’ intention to have a second child by 7.69%, with the effect being concentrated on renters. Housing booms affect couples’ desired fertility through negative income and high opportunity cost channels. (JEL code: R31, J13, J38).

Concerns about housing affordability are widespread in cities worldwide, prompting discussions about rent control policies. This paper studies the effects of a rent control policy adopted in Catalonia in 2020 that applied to some but not all municipalities. The policy virtually covered all the rental market and forced ads and tenancy agreements to specify the applicable rent cap to ensure enforcement. To identify the causal effect of the rent control regulation on the rental market, we exploit register microdata of tenancy agreements and implement difference-in-differences regressions and event-study designs. Our results indicate that the regulation reduced average rents paid by about 4% to 6%. We do not find evidence of a reduction in the supply of rental units, as measured by the number of signed and ended agreements or the active stock of rental units. We implement several robustness tests to address identification concerns related to Covid-19. Our results suggest that rent control policies can effectively reduce rental prices without necessarily shrinking the rental market.

Between 2015 and 2017, the Law of Heights (Policy-562) regulated areas of urban renewal in specific locations of Bogotá (Colombia). Using a novel dataset based on detailed information at the block level between 2008 and 2017, we study whether this policy affected real estate prices. Our empirical strategy compares the price per square meter before and after Policy-562 in treated blocks and in control blocks with similar pre-treatment traits. Results show that prices increased more in treated blocks than in the rest of the city. We also provide evidence that results are heterogeneous from a temporal, land use and strata point of view.

Recent empirical work suggests that agglomeration forces are multiple times higher in developing countries than in advanced economies, but also that these cities are crowded and dysfunctional. To understand the true productivity advantages of developing country cities, we systematically evaluate nearly 1300 agglomeration elasticity estimates from 76 studies in 34 countries. Using frontier methodology for conducting meta-analyses, we find that the elasticity in developing countries are less than 1 percentage point higher than in advanced economies, with the difference not being statistically significant. Further, we present novel estimates of urban costs in developing and developed country cities – pollution, carbon emissions, wellbeing, homicides and congestion. While the levels of urban costs and the elasticity of crime are higher in developing country cities, other measures of urban cost elasticity are not different across income groups.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of a coal bust on urban growth. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that China's 2012–2015 coal bust significantly reduced the growth rate of local GDP, especially in coal producing cities located far from the coast or seaports. This negative growth effect decreased one year after coal prices had recovered, but the level of the effect remained relatively persistent. The results of further analysis show that regional economies adjust to adverse shocks primarily through a reduction in urban employment and the exit of small and geographically disadvantaged firms, as the decrease in wages during a bust is insufficient to attract an inflow of firms and capital.

We consider jurisdictions of different population size that provide local public goods with positive spillovers. Matching grants can induce optimal expenditure levels, but the regions can exploit the rationale behind this system to induce bailouts. We formalize the too-big-to-fail result of Wildasin (1997) by proving that it exists in a subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium, in which the central government’s decisions are taken by regional representatives. Furthermore, our model contains the too-big-to-fail and too-small-to-fail outcomes as special cases, and we are the first to derive the conditions under which each result emerges.