Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

We uniquely examine an upstream mixed duopoly engaging in spatial price discrimination across a continuum of downstream markets. The monopoly firms in those markets face elastic final demand creating double marginalization. The upstream public firm faces a cost disadvantage relative to its private rival that declines as it is partially privatized. We show that the fully public firm improves social welfare relative to a private duopoly when it is not overly inefficient and when differentiation is sufficiently large. We also show that whenever this is the case, there exists an optimal degree of partial privatization that better aligns the trade-off between production costs and pricing distortions.

We develop an urban search-and-matching model. There is a central city, where all firms and jobs are located, and a continuum of peripheral cities. The population endogenously splits between migrants (who relocate from their hometown to the central city), commuters (who travel every day to work in the central city) and home stayers (who remain in their hometown). We prove that the market equilibrium is usually not optimal: a composition externality may generate under- or over-migration compared to the central planner’s solution, which results in under-investment in job vacancies and therefore production. We calibrate the model to the Greater Paris area and quantify this externality. Results suggest over-migration but policy interventions can help reducing inefficiencies.

This paper employs a large scale numerical spatial general equilibrium model featuring capital-skill complementarities in production to study the distributional implications of a capital-augmenting technological shift across regions and skills groups. Similarly to the existing literature, we find a negative relationship between the labour income share and the capital labour-ratio. Our counterfactual shows that the effects are quite uneven across skills and regions, benefiting mostly high-skilled workers at the detriment of the low and the medium skilled. This is particularly so in more developed regions compared with less developed ones. We show that the effects stem from regional initial conditions, and in particular the regional capital–labour ratio, trade linkages and unemployment rates.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has implemented a large-scale multi-year infrastructure program called the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) to improve air transportation efficiency. To assess its efficacy, we estimate how NextGen projects completed between 2014 and 2017 affected air travel time and delays using an event study approach. We find sizable time savings in air travel time and delays from implementing NextGen. The time savings are more substantial for flights that experience unexpected shocks, such as poor weather and prior delays. In contrast, while NextGen seemed to close the performance gap between the hub and non-hub carriers generated by market power, the effect was short-lived and quickly reversed. Although we also find some small social benefits from carbon emission reductions, we cannot rule out that aggregate carbon emissions may have increased due to a rebound effect.

Over 100,000 pedestrians have been struck and killed by vehicles on US roadways in the first two decades of the 21st century, representing an alarming public health issue. We examine the US Interstate Highway System’s legacy in contributing to local pedestrian deaths using historical Interstate Highway plans as an instrument for local Interstate construction. Operating an Interstate through a census tract increased local pedestrian deaths significantly. Among 17,000 tracts bisected by Interstates, we estimate the average tract experienced 2.5 additional pedestrian deaths between 2001–2020 due to the presence of the Interstate. We find these deaths occur disproportionately in Black communities.

We examine the determinants of COVID-19 risk exposure in the context of the initial wave in New York City. In the first wave of the pandemic, out-of-home activity and household crowding were strongly associated with hospitalization at an individual level. After mass layoffs and shelter in place restrictions, out-of-home mobility decreased in importance for the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization, while the household crowding channel remained important. A larger share of individuals in crowded housing or with high measures of out-of-home mobility were Black, Hispanic, and lower-income—which contributed to disparities in disease risk. We conclude that structural socio-economic inequalities helped determine the cross-section of COVID-19 risk exposure in urban areas.

This study investigates whether municipal mergers result in lower waste management costs. We develop a novel virtual merging method based on machine learning techniques to compile the data of the control group and estimate the effect of the large-scale consolidation in Japan on the various costs of managing municipal solid waste. We find that these mergers actually led to an increase in the total cost per ton. Estimation results also reveal that the construction cost increased in the post-merger period, which can be explained by the special bonds provided by the national government for new projects in merged municipalities. By contrast, the processing and management cost is little affected by the mergers, except for the absorption-type mergers and municipalities that never joined waste management associations. These results suggest that municipal mergers might not always bring a substantial scale economy in municipal solid waste management. Policymakers should be careful when promoting municipal mergers in the belief that a scale economy will prevail after the reform.

This study examines a 4.3 km expansion of Singapore's metro transit system. Despite a short line, it better connected existing lines and improved the connectivity levels of numerous stations across the city, as evidenced by connectivity indices. The improvement allowed residents living near those stations to access other places more easily, leading to greater convenience and higher home value in those stations' neighborhoods. Using difference-in-differences to compare housing price and connectivity changes in all neighborhoods with or without a station, we find that a 1% improvement in connectivity can increase local housing prices by 0.37%. The identification is anchored to the broad impact of the network reconfiguration, which was caused by the new transport infrastructure, on the connectivity changes in distant areas. Several techniques and tests enhance robustness. These include an estimation of the treatment boundary that defines proximity to stations, propensity score matching or weighting to mitigate sample imbalance, event study for the parallel trend, parameter sensitivity tests, etc. The research highlights that a small transport project can generate broad impacts on the whole city.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend towards teleworking. Many predicted that this would shift housing demand to the suburbs and homes with the potential for high quality office space. We examine these predictions using a survey of the working age population who live in the private housing sector. The majority in the sector are happy with their current home, but new teleworkers who plan to continue to do so – accounting for one fifth of the population – are characterised by a higher intention to move. Consistent with predictions, these teleworkers value a high quality home office more than others and are prepared to live further away from the centre to find it.

This article investigates the heterogeneous effects of urban transport infrastructure on population distribution within a city. I focus on the case of Xiamen—a coastal city in China—where two bridges and a tunnel have been built to promote population growth on the city’s periphery. I first show that although population share increased substantially on the bridges-connected periphery, no significant growth in the population share was observed on the tunnel-connected periphery. This pattern is surprising, given that the reduction in the commuting distance enabled by the tunnel is more than five times as large as that enabled by the bridges. I then calibrate a quantitative urban model to demonstrate the importance of access to high-quality schools in explaining the distinct effects of the infrastructures. Counterfactual exercises suggest that increasing educational resources on the tunnel-connected periphery or relaxing the restriction on cross-district school enrollment may facilitate the intended population growth effect of the tunnel.