Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

Congestion is one of the most challenging issues of urban agglomeration. Congestion costs are higher than socially optimal levels, and more information is needed about the key parameters required to design optimal policies. This paper exploits an exogenous reduction in for-hire vehicle supply in New York City to estimate their effect on travel speed and document substitution patterns to other transportation modes. A 9.1 percent decrease in taxis is associated with increased travel speed by 0.45 min per mile, a 7.2 percent increase. Consumer surplus gains from increased speed fade as waiting times increase and people switch to other transportation modes.

This paper studies an Education Fee Reduction and Exemption Program for preschool childcare in Jinan, China, to explore the benefit incidence among different stakeholders by observing how housing prices and rents change in response to this program and by employing a method of difference-in-differences combined with boundary discontinuity. The empirical findings indicate that the housing prices in the experimental area rose by 5–7 percent while the rents rose by 10–13 percent due to the capitalization effects of this equalization program. Falsification tests are conducted using artificial boundaries and fake policy implementation dates. A back-of-the-envelope welfare analysis demonstrates that a considerable portion of the program's benefits is offset by house price increases for new home buyers and rent increases for tenants, with significant distributional implications for different stakeholders.

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.