Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

Grocery food sales taxes (or grocery taxes) in the United States are applied in the form of a state and/or county tax. To investigate how local governments establish these grocery taxes, we develop a dynamic gaming model to explain the county–county and county–state interactions regarding grocery taxes. Leveraging novel panel data on grocery taxes at county and state levels from 2006 to 2017, we estimate a dynamic spatial model including multilevel governments. The empirical evidence unveils three key spatial determinants that contribute to variations in county grocery tax rates. (1) A negative vertical impact from the home state, (2) a positive horizontal effect from neighboring counties, and (3) a positive diagonal effect from neighboring states.

Amid a renewed interest in rent control due to the housing affordability crisis, the scope and distribution of its benefits remain underexplored. Using methodological innovations, this study quantifies rent discounts for rent-stabilized units in New York City (NYC) from 2002 to 2017. We estimate an average discount of $410 per month. Additionally, we note that these discounts are: (1) not progressively distributed towards lower-income households; (2) more pronounced in Manhattan and increasing in gentrifying areas; and (3) double for households correctly aware of the policy. The aggregate rent discounts range between $4 and $5.4 billion annually, representing 10%–14% of the federal budget for means-tested housing programs. While White tenants received larger rent discounts in the 2000s, racial disparities in these discounts have largely diminished since 2011, consistent with patterns in spatial sorting and gentrification.

An upstream firm provides a valuable component with either an exclusive or nonexclusive contract to two downstream firms on a horizontal market. The downstream firms engage in either uniform pricing or spatial price discrimination. The component provider is more likely to sign an exclusive contract under discriminatory pricing. Discriminatory pricing generates higher welfare when both pricing methods result in exclusive contracts and generates the same welfare when both methods result in nonexclusive contracts. Importantly it generates lower welfare when discriminatory pricing results in exclusive contracts and uniform pricing results in nonexclusive contracts. These results prove robust to a variety of model variations.

Place-based policies and investments are often targeted at areas in economic decline and sometimes take the form of a granted monopoly (e.g., state flagship universities, professional sports franchises, mega events). After New Jersey voters approved legalized gambling as an economic development strategy to revive the blighted seaside resort town, Atlantic City held a regional monopoly on casinos east of the Mississippi River from 1978 through 1992. Using synthetic difference-in-differences, I find that commercial casinos had an immediate impact on the Atlantic City Metropolitan Area (Atlantic County) in the first five years through an increase in employment (26 percent), wages (9 percent), personal income (5 percent), and house prices (19 percent). The casinos’ positive impact on the metropolitan labor market was persistent and increasing through the early 1990s, but I find evidence that the city’s 1992 monopoly expiration negatively impacted the growth of local wages and personal income through 2000.

This study estimates the effect of land use regulation on land price by exploiting the feature of building height limits of the aviation law in Fukuoka, Japan. The law limits the height of a building that is within 4000 meters of an airport to 54.1 m, but when the distance exceeds 4000 meters, the limits are relaxed. Exploiting this regulation feature, we estimate the effect of the regulation on land price using the regression kink design. We find that building height restriction has a significantly negative effect on land price and the magnitude of the effects depends on the stringency of regulation.

Historically coal has offered both benefits and costs to urban areas. Benefits include coal’s role in fueling industry and thus employment. The primary costs are air pollution and its impact on human health. This paper starts by using a Rosen–Roback style model to examine how differences in local coal availability affect equilibrium city employment. Drawing on the model, the paper surveys papers that examine the net effects of coal on the growth in city population and air pollution on health. The paper then turns to papers that explicitly consider the trade-offs between production benefits and pollution disamenities across space and over time. The paper ends with a discussion of opportunities for future work on coal and cities in historical settings.

We present a novel approach to analyze the effects of EU cohesion policy on local economic activity. For all municipalities in the border area of the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland, we collect project-level data on EU funding in the period between 2007 and 2013. Using night light emission data as a proxy for economic development, we show that receiving a higher amount of EU funding is associated with increased economic activity at the municipal level. Our paper demonstrates that remote sensing data can provide an effective way to model local economic development also in Europe, where comprehensive cross-border data are not available at such a spatially granular level.

Intermediaries play an important role in markets with asymmetric information by reducing search friction and uncertainty for buyers and sellers. However, when a conflict of interest arises, agents may not fully act on behalf of their clients. Using a unique dataset of both housing resale transactions and agent showing records from a major brokerage firm, we document the brokerage agents' steering behaviors induced by the differential treatment of certain housing units under the taxation scheme in China. Our results show that brokerage agents strategically promote the units that receive more favorable tax treatment because these units offer higher expected commissions. The steering efforts lead to better sales performances of the promoted houses and are highly correlated with the agents' ability and steering incentives. Buyers' viewing and purchasing decisions are significantly affected by agents’ steering.

This paper studies the financing of local public projects. The setting is a community with durable housing, undeveloped land available for new homes, and population turnover. The community invests in a public project that may be financed with a mix of a tax on current residents and a debt issue. The paper shows that financing with a debt–tax mix is equivalent to pure tax finance coupled with a tax on future development whose proceeds are shared by future residents. This result has three implications. First, Ricardian Equivalence holds if and only if there would be no future development were the project purely tax financed. Second, when Ricardian Equivalence does not hold, the optimal debt level is such that the associated tax on development appropriately internalizes the negative externalities from this development. Third, when Ricardian Equivalence does not hold, the debt level preferred by current residents will be higher than optimal.