Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

This paper estimates the long-run effects on a county's prime-age employment rate of labor demand shocks to both the county and its overlying commuting zone (CZ). These effects are allowed to vary with local “distress” (a low baseline employment rate of the county or CZ), and with the size of the demand shock. In more distressed CZs, a county's employment rate is more affected by county or CZ shocks. As a result, targeting or reallocating jobs to more distressed CZs will tend to raise employment rates. If a county is relatively distressed compared to its CZ, targeting job shocks at that county has greater effects on county employment rates. Reallocating CZ jobs or job shocks towards more distressed counties within a CZ results in greater effects on the CZ's average employment rate. In addition, a CZ shock's effects on a county's employment rate tend to be higher if the CZ's baseline demand-driven expected growth trend is below average. This is particularly true in CZs whose baseline distress was average or low.

Peripheral and demographically fragile territories could be less resilient to the impact of large natural shocks such as earthquakes, but causal evidence is still limited, in particular for Western Europe. By leveraging data at municipal level, this paper studies the effects on the resident population of a large earthquake that affected a wide area in Central Italy in 2016. The demographic decline that the area was already experiencing before the event significantly worsened afterwards. In order to identify the earthquake’s impact a diff-in-diff event-study model is applied, thereby testing whether the control group (made up of similar municipalities in terms of geo-morphological and predetermined urbanization characteristics) provides a comparable population pattern before the event. The results show that the earthquake significantly exacerbated the population decrease, with the impact widening over time and corresponding to almost two fifths of the reduction actually observed. Although statistically significant for the whole area, the impact was more intense for the municipalities that suffered the most damage. An increasing effect on the share of elderly population was also detected. The overall impact was mostly driven by a worsening in net internal migration.

Whether citizens like or dislike federal policies often depends on regional differences. Because of geography, (economic) history or other path-dependent factors, certain regions are perceived to get more out of the union than others. We show that citizens, therefore, have a strategic incentive to elect Federal delegates that are more extreme than the representative voter. The intensity of such strategic delegation is U-shaped in expected benefits. The predictions of our model hence rationalise the voting differences we observe in the data between national and EU elections.

Despite its importance as a public good, little research studies how fire protection services affect housing markets or other economic outcomes. We focus on fire levies that are up for renewal so that the timing of the levy is exogenous, to help preserve the independence of votes. We use regression discontinuity to compare the price of houses in fire districts that barely pass and fail to renew a fire tax levy. House values drop at least 6.7 % the year after a community votes to cut fire protection funding, which is a quarter of a standard deviation of sale price and larger than the capitalization of crime, school quality, or environmental quality. Tax levies representing more than the median 18.8 % funding drop elicit a larger drop in house prices. The short-term decrease does not persist, though, suggesting limited awareness and a decline in risk perception over time by buyers and sellers.

This paper examines the challenges and opportunities in decarbonizing the passenger road transportation sector by reviewing recent empirical evidence and drawing lessons for developing countries. It first identifies the advantages and disadvantages of various policy instruments to promote modal shifts and vehicle fuel efficiency, and then discusses the potential impacts of electrification and ride-hailing in transportation decarbonization. While developing countries face formidable challenges in reducing carbon emissions from passenger transportation due to income and population growth, the paper argues that a unique window of opportunity exists to foster a culture of sustainable travel behavior by expanding public transit in combination with market-based pricing policies.

Does spending time in a location cause a person to stay there longer? We use a 1999 change in Danish refugee settlement policy to address this question. The policy change strongly encouraged refugees to stay in their assigned settlement municipality for at least three years. Using empirical designs for natural experiments, we find that treated refugees were more likely to be in their assigned location many years after their residence was granted. In a difference-in-differences specification, treated refugees were 4.8 percentage points more likely to remain in their first commuting zone 13 years later. A regression discontinuity design delivers a larger but less precise point estimate.

In our evaluation of the housing expenditure share cap, a macroprudential policy, we discover the importance of modeling space. In a spatial model, the equilibrium features income-based spatial sorting where a household competes with households of their own income type for residential space. As a result, the cap policy causes a larger drop in housing demand, and consequently a larger reduction in equilibrium housing prices, for constrained low-income families than for unconstrained high-income families. Depending on the assumption on households’ preference, this mechanism leads to a smaller increase or even a modest decrease in welfare inequality in a spatial model than in a spaceless model.

We discuss two approaches to estimating the air quality impacts of public transit projects, focusing on Metro projects in the context of developing countries: air quality modeling and reduced-form econometric methods. As we illustrate, pollution reductions due to Metro projects implied by pollutant chemistry, vehicle emissions factors, and modal shifts may differ from econometric estimates of the impact of transit projects on ambient pollution concentrations. We discuss both approaches and illustrate how economics researchers can use estimated emissions reductions associated with a transit project and pollutant chemistry as a check on their estimates of changes in ambient concentrations.

We consider the implications of unifying the distinct literatures on residential sorting and human capital dynamics. We argue that integrating insights from recent work in both areas has important implications for future research at the intersection of environmental and urban economics. To focus attention on these implications, we summarize stylized facts from recent empirical work on residential sorting and on the effects of exposures to environmental factors on human capital. Then we outline a simple overlapping generations model that reproduces these stylized facts and use it to guide our discussion on directions for future research.

Do environmental conditions pose greater health risks to individuals living in urban or rural areas? The answer is theoretically ambiguous: while urban areas have traditionally been associated with heightened exposure to environmental pollutants, the economies of scale and density inherent to urban environments offer unique opportunities for mitigating or adapting to these harmful exposures. To make progress on this question, we focus on the United States and consider how exposures – to air pollution, drinking water pollution, and extreme temperatures – and the response to those exposures differ across urban and rural settings. While prior studies have addressed some aspects of these issues, substantial gaps in knowledge remain, in large part due to historical deficiencies in monitoring and reporting, especially in rural areas. As a step toward closing these gaps, we present new evidence on urban–rural differences in air quality and population sensitivity to air pollution, leveraging recent advances in remote sensing measurement and machine learning. We find that the urban–rural gap in fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) has converged over the last two decades and the remaining gap is small relative to the overall declines. Furthermore, we find that residents of urban counties are, on average, less vulnerable to the mortality effects of PM_2.5 exposure. We also discuss promising areas for future research.