Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

To what extent do highways increase income in the European Union? To answer the question, this paper uses detailed data on the expansion of highways in Europe between 1990 and 2020 combined with time-invariant data on more than 2.3 million roads and 1400 ferry connections. I construct a new network database of highways, roads and ferries depicting a 31-year evolution of the lowest travel times along 51 000 region-to-region routes. To tackle endogeneity, I use non-local highway improvements as a source of exogenous variation. Reduced-form estimations suggest that, through decreasing transportation costs, highways increase aggregate regional income and economic cohesion. The study determines that transportation infrastructure policies can generate substantial economic benefits and reduce income disparities between poor and rich European regions.

The world has pledged to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030 to halt the rapid deterioration of critical ecosystems. We summarize the state of knowledge about the impacts of protected area policies, with a focus on deforestation and vegetation cover. We discuss critical issues around data and measurement, identify the most commonly-used empirical methods, and summarize empirical evidence across multiple regions of the world. In most cases, protection has had at most a modest impact on forest cover, with stronger effects in areas that face pressure of economic development. We then identify several open areas for research to advance our understanding of the effectiveness of protected area policies: the use of promising recent econometric advancements, shifting focus to direct measures of biodiversity, filling the knowledge gap on the effect of protected area policy in advanced economies, investigating the long-run impacts of protection, and understanding its equilibrium effects.

During a time of rising concern about climate change, the urban public transit sector has not significantly reduced its carbon footprint. Using data from the nation's transit agencies over the years 2002–2019, we document that the energy efficiency gains of US public transit lagged the gains of European public transit and the US private transportation. The carbon footprint of a transportation provider depends on scale, composition, and technique effects. We use this accounting framework to explore several possible explanations for our findings. We contrast the incentive effects that a private entity versus a public transit agency faces in decarbonizing.

An emerging labor economics literature examines the consequences of firms exercising market power in local labor markets. The extent of this market power is likely to vary across local labor markets. In choosing what local labor market to live and work in, workers tradeoff wages, house prices and local amenities. Building on the Rosen/Roback spatial equilibrium model, we investigate how the existence of local monopsony power affects the cross-sectional spatial distribution of house prices across cities. We find that house prices decline with increases in the employment concentration in the local market. For renters, this offsets roughly 70 percent of the estimated monopsony wage effect and shifts part of the costs of monopsony to homeowners. We find evidence that collective bargaining and minimum wages limit the extent of capitalization of monopsony power into house prices.

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.