Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

This paper proposes estimating higher-order spatial autoregressions with spatial autoregressive errors and heteroskedastic error innovations without searching for instruments by explicitly exploiting the endogeneity of spatial lags in the outcome and error equations. The resulting estimator is shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate that it possesses better finite-sample properties than existing estimators. An empirical study of venture capital funding for biotechnology firms illustrates that spatial correlation stretches as far as 20 miles and that the number of venture capital firms in close proximity has stronger impact on the level of funding than as reported in an existing study.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it introduces novel regression models that combine two important areas of the methodological development in panel data analysis, namely a varying coefficient specification and spatial error dependence. The former allows relatively flexible nonlinear interactions; the latter enables spatial correlations of the disturbance and thus differ significantly from the other random effect models in the literature. To estimate the model, a new estimation procedure is established that can be viewed as a generalization of the quasi-maximum likelihood method for a spatial panel data model to the well-known conditional local likelihood procedure. Novel inference methods, particularly variable selection and hypothesis testing of the parameter constancy, are introduced and are shown to be effective under the complex spatial error dependence. Equally importantly, this paper makes a substantial contribution to the understanding of financing and expenditure for health and social care. In particular, we empirically analyze and explain the effects of political ideologies on the local fiscal policy in England, especially the expenditure on mental health services.

We present an urban land use model with land tenure insecurity and information asymmetry regarding risks of contested land ownership, a very common issue in West African cities. A market failure emerges assellers do not internalize the impact of their market participation decision on the average quality of traded plots, which in turn affects other sellers and buyers’ decisions. The equilibrium is suboptimal and has too many transactions of insecure plots and too few transactions of secure plots. This market failure can be addressed when agents trade along trusted kinship lines that discourage undisclosed sales of insecure plots. Such kinship matching is an important feature of West African societies, including on the market for informal land, as illustrated by a unique survey administered in Bamako, Mali. In the model, the extent to which the market failure is addressed increases with the intensity of kinship ties. When sellers also have the possibility of registering their property right in a cadastre, this not only further attenuates information asymmetry but also helps reduce risk. We find complementarity between kinship matching and registration: As transactions along trusted kinship lines tend to involve plots that are more secure on average, kinship matching makes registration better targeted at insecure plots traded outside kinship ties.In this context, a partial registration fee subsidy can bring the economy to the social optimum.¹

We exploit the differential responses of Airbnb hosts to two distinct policy interventions in Berlin to shed light on the optimal design of policies targeting short-term rental platforms to mitigate rental market inflation. The first intervention, which affected commercial listings, significantly impacted long-term rental markets, unlike the second intervention, which mainly affected non-commercial listings. Leveraging these policy variations, we estimate the marginal impact of Airbnb on rental supply and rents. Each additional commercial Airbnb listing displaces 0.23 to 0.37 rental units and increases rent per square meter by 1.3 to 2.4 percent. This underscores the importance of targeting commercial listings when regulating short-term rental markets.

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.