Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

We use data from Italy to study the political and social impact of a refugee reception policy (SPRAR) directly managed by local governments, whose features recall the conditions of the contact theory (Allport, 1954). Instrumental variables estimates indicate that municipalities that opened a refugee center between the 2013 and 2018 national elections experienced a change in the vote shares of extreme-right parties that is approximately 7 percentage points lower compared to municipalities that did not open a refugee center. We document that the positive impact of SPRARs on “compositional amenities” (i.e., local schools) and population growth allows explaining the negative impact on anti-immigrant prejudice. Finally, we provide evidence of spillovers in prejudice reduction in neighboring municipalities without a SPRAR.

We employ a dynamic regression discontinuity design comparing business outcomes in areas that passed additional school property taxes to business outcomes in areas that failed to do so. On average, these referenda increase local property taxes by approximately 8 percent. We find little evidence that passage of a property tax referendum influences the total number of establishments in the district in the following years. Further, there is little evidence that property taxes affect total establishment births or deaths. Heterogeneity analysis does not find differences across various measures of firm exposure to property taxes.

Managed retreat is the relocation of households out of harm's way. After the 2011 Christchurch (New Zealand) earthquake, around 16000 people were thus relocated in a managed retreat program. We use administrative panel data (2004–2018) to identify the effects of this managed retreat on the relocated population. We find that, compared to the non-relocated residents, the relocated population experienced a significant initial decrease in their wages, and in their total income. Wages of those who were relocated were reduced by around $NZ 1900. Women faced greater absolute and relative decreases in wages. This finding has direct implications for the compensation packages that should be proposed for managed retreat programs.

In this article, I use a regression discontinuity design to quantify the race between Chinese cities to build taller skyscrapers. I begin by characterizing this height competition with a game-theoretic model for multi-stage, two-player, all-pay auctions with carryover. The dominant mixed strategy equilibrium of this dynamic game implies that a city would be more inclined to construct a taller skyscraper if its current tallest building is merely shorter than the tallest in the rival city, and this inclination is discontinuous at which the heights of these two buildings are equal. Utilizing a large data set of China’s skyscrapers constructed between 2004 and 2019, I confirm the presence of this between-city contest by empirically identifying the discontinuity in a city’s probability of constructing a taller building. I also find that this height competition has been more prevalent among the cities with fewer historic amenities or with leaders that have lower promotion likelihoods prior to the start of office.

We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the take-off of teleworking. We develop an index for the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives and frictions to its deployment. We find that the valuation of offices declined more in areas more exposed to telecommuting, a pattern that we do not observe for retail assets. In addition, we show that telecommuting increases vacancy, decreases construction, while transaction volumes are not affected. It implies that the drop in price is due to a shift in demand for space. In addition, our result suggests that market participants are expecting the shift to teleworking to durably affect the demand for office space.

Under-priced street parking is widely considered to be a great urban policy failure and is partly what motivated Stockholm to expand its parking zones for both visitors and residents from 2016 onwards. In this paper we use a unique natural experiment to study the effect of priced parking on property prices in Stockholm suburbs. We find that apartment prices were negatively affected by the unexpected appeal and subsequent revocation of parking fees. This finding is interpreted to mean that the introduction of priced parking yielded benefits to apartment residents in the studied areas, which were capitalized in the price of housing. Based on our estimated results, we find that the implied benefits to residents amounted to the equivalent of approximately €2.5 per day. We investigate whether apartments were differentially impacted based on their distance to public transit but find no strong evidence to support this hypothesis. For single-family homes, no conclusions can be drawn as the standard errors are large in relation to the estimated effects.

This paper studies how the local adjustments of minimum wage levels in China affect the locations of new business entries. We use a refined border approach to address the endogeneity concerns regarding local minimum wage levels and examine whether differential changes in minimum wage levels on both sides of a county border result in abrupt changes in business entries within short distances from the border. Our results suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage levels decreases business entries by 2.69%. This effect is magnified for industries that pay lower average salaries or employ a larger share of unskilled workers. The entry-discouraging effects of high minimum wage levels are stronger when closer to the border where the identification assumption of the border approach is the most likely to hold and gradually decrease as we expand the widths of the border areas. Moreover, although we expect businesses could move across county borders at relatively low costs to avoid high minimum wage levels, we find that business relocation is rare and does not significantly respond to changes in the cross-county difference in minimum wage levels.

Terror attacks in Europe have increased substantially since the turn of the last century. Using data from European Social Surveys (ESS), we examine their effects on political attitudes and orientation by comparing within-country survey responses shortly before and after terror attacks involving at least one fatality. At the national level, we find little support for the hypothesis that terror attacks influenced attitudes towards immigration or political orientation. By contrast, there is evidence of post-attack increases in satisfaction with the national government and trust in parliament among ESS respondents living in the region that was attacked.

This paper develops a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model for the German economy to address two issues. First, we explore the role of commuting for local labor markets and their capacity to absorb productivity shocks. Second, we address the role of housing markets for quantitative analyses. Germany is an exciting laboratory because commuting across local labor markets is pervasive, unique data are available, and because Germany's high degree of trade openness poses a thrilling counterpoint to the United States. Our key findings for German counties are that the employment and resident elasticities associated with local productivity shocks are much above unity, yet disparate (the former larger than the latter), very heterogeneous, and only poorly predicted by simple labor market statistics. Allowing the supply of land/housing to be price elastic increases the elasticities and reinforces our conclusions. The regional heterogeneity of the land/housing shares in Germany turns out to be inessential for our findings, the level of the land/housing share plays an important role, however. We perform a plethora of robustness checks which allow us to gain perspective on extant findings for the United States.

The welfare effect of urban renewal policies depends on the size of the external effects and the quantity of the building stock that gets redeveloped. While evidence on the externalities is growing, there is still a need for credibly identified estimates of the responsiveness of redevelopment. I exploit a sharp reduction in the value-added tax (VAT) on construction services for redevelopment in a select group of 32 Belgian cities to fill this gap. The results show that a 15 percentage point reduction in the VAT rate leads to an increase in the amount of demolished and redeveloped floorspace of respectively 36% and 35%.