Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

Residential solar installations have increased 10-fold over the past decade and are becoming more common in neighborhoods around the United States. This raises the question of how solar affects housing markets. Is the investment fully capitalized in home values? We review the literature on the solar home price premium and present a model to provide a framework for understanding the empirical challenge of quantifying capitalization. We estimate a hedonic model and find that the residual value of a homeowner-owned solar system at the time of a transaction is roughly fully capitalized into home values when we use a discount rate of 15%. Third-party owned systems exhibit a much lower capitalization. We find that solar homes are more likely to have made home improvements leading to substantial bias when home improvements are omitted. We conclude with opportunities for future research.

The decisions related to migration – where to live, when to move, and where to move – have a long history in economics. Different fields, within economics and outside economics, have developed different empirical methods to study migration and its consequences. However, these literatures rarely cite each other and there is little crossover between them. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to provide a simple theoretical framework for understanding general equilibrium effects in migration models that can help researchers think through the specific contexts in which these will be a problem for reduced form estimation. Second, to examine the different literatures in economics that have addressed the question of the effects of environmental amenities on migration with an eye to the differences across them and the way they can complement each other.

We review economic research that focuses on topics connecting surface and drinking water quality and issues in urban economics. We organize our discussion around the major phases of the water resource and urban system relationship. First, we review work concerned with how urban water systems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries served primarily as a means of production in urban centers. We then discuss the regulation of surface and drinking water in modern times, which arose as cities transitioned from being centers of production to centers of consumption. We also examine water as an amenity in the modern consumer city. We close by offering thoughts on future policy challenges and research needs and opportunities.

Market liquidity is an important aspect of housing market developments. The time on market (TOM) of sold properties is frequently used by researchers, practitioners, and policymakers as a market liquidity indicator. Compared to research on house price indices, the literature is very sparse on constructing housing market liquidity indices. This paper proposes a new method to construct constant-quality market liquidity indices based on TOM. The first contribution is that the method improves end-of-sample reliability resulting in fewer revisions. This increases the practical usefulness for business and policy purposes. The second contribution is that the applied structural time series method is designed to work in thin markets. This allows index construction at the local level.

Disparities in health and socioeconomic well-being are a result of the cumulative impacts from multiple coinciding environmental, health, and social stressors. Addressing cumulative impacts is seen as a crucial step toward environmental justice (EJ). Using the case of the United States, we compare different methods to operationalize the concept for real-world application. We empirically demonstrate the extent to which non-White and low-income neighborhoods are subject to a wide array of burdens and how these burdens are reflected in national EJ indices and housing prices. We find that non-White and low-income neighborhoods are correlated with measures of multiple environmental burdens and social stressors but correlate to a lesser extent with natural disaster risk. Two existing EJ indices are only moderately correlated and more correlated with low-income status than with percent non-White. Models that employ the housing market for benefits estimation may fail to capture preferences to avoid multiple stressors due to issues including data availability and market frictions, such as discrimination. Finally, we highlight the challenges in cumulative impacts analysis for research and policy-making.

Residential land use density regulation is an important policy instrument for reducing the local external diseconomies caused by concentration of population and buildings in urban areas. But density regulation also affects the distribution of population across the whole urban space, which determines the travel demands hence traffic flows over the transportation network in the city. In this paper, we formulate a model integrating the residential location choice equilibrium, traffic network equilibrium and the housing market equilibrium, subject to floor area ratio (FAR) regulation, a representative practical strategy for density regulation. The restriction of FAR regulation on housing supply is formulated as a development coordination cost function dependent on the level of FAR that is actually realized under the designated upper FAR limit. Complementary location-specific tax/subsidy policies, and road pricing schemes, are also addressed in a unified manner.

The mathematical structure of the model is explored, and efficient algorithms are developed for solving the equilibrium equations, and for the optimization of FAR regulations and the pecuniary strategies.

We explore urban earnings premiums for young, native, rural-to-urban movers in Norway. Using an augmented difference-in-differences estimator (DiD-TR) on microdata we challenge previous claims about urban earnings premium's size and sources. Conventional econometric estimators understate the static premium and overstate dynamic premiums. We find that migrants exhibit lower mean but faster pre-move earnings growth than non-migrants. Post-move, the static earnings premium dominates. The observed trajectory is related to frequent pre-move changes of industrial sector, presumably to obtain better job-worker matches. Post-move, these changes occur less frequently. Highly educated females exhibit largest static premiums (34%), less-educated females least (24%), males an intermediate amount. Our findings suggest that cities primarily generate earnings premiums through agglomeration-based efficiencies and superior job-worker matches varying heterogeneously by education and gender.

This paper investigates the impact of the UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) inscription on income and property values in Italian municipalities with heritage sites inscribed during the past two decades. To address the selection bias and identify the causal impact of inscription, we focus on municipalities having sites included in the national ‘tentative list’ (i.e., a list of candidates for subsequent nomination) and exploit the plausibly exogenous timing of inscription conditional upon being on the list. The evidence from a heterogeneity-robust event study analysis suggests that WHL listing has a significant impact on income and property prices in urban areas. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed.

High levels of neighborhood political residential segregation have recently been documented for the U.S. This has raised concerns, based on the argument that more politically homogeneous neighborhoods promote extremism and ideological intensity, resulting in this same extremism displayed by elected politicians. Using tens of thousands of single-family home sales from South Florida, our purpose is to examine the extent to which neighborhood observable descriptors can explain party segregation. Our results reveal significant differences between Democrat and Republican home buyers in the types of neighborhoods they choose. In comparison to Democrats, Republicans more frequently chose neighborhoods where a larger percentage of workers have short commutes, homes are on average larger in size, there are fewer restaurants and shops, population density is lower, and Hispanics are a smaller percentage of residents. These differences are found to be important in explaining neighborhood party segregation.

Aggregate land value is useful for a variety of research purposes including measuring the social surplus generated by cities and evaluating urban development policies. Nevertheless, only one previous study, Albouy et al., (2018), has attempted to measure cross-sectionally comparable aggregate land values for U.S. cities. That study relied on vacant or near-vacant land sales and used a single pooled aggregate estimate of the land value function. This research uses land values imputed by Larson et al., (2021) to estimate land value gradients for individual cities. Furthermore, the city boundary is measured using estimates of population density functions. Aggregate land value estimates from Albouy et al., (2018) and the individual city gradient approach used here are tested against the prediction of the Rosen, (1974)-Roback, (1982) model, that land value should rise with variables reflecting natural amenity. The individual city gradient approach produces estimates of intercity variation in aggregate land value that agree well with those in Albouy et al., (2018) and are consistent with theoretical expectations.