Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

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.

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 United States public transit lagged the gains of European public transit and the domestic 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.

This study attempts to combine a labor supply model with a housing location model. We focus on the trade-off between hours of work, commute times, and leisure time as well as the trade-off between the consumption of a good, housing space, and leisure time. We show that both labor supply and urban location choice have an inverted U-shaped relationship regarding the wage rate. These results are empirically shown by using Japanese data on the hours of work and commute times by household income class and on the number of households by income class.

This paper exploits the 2010 dissolution of the personal income tax reciprocity agreement between Minnesota and Wisconsin to estimate how state tax policies affect interstate commuting. This policy shock increased tax liability for some commuters and tax compliance costs for all commuters. Using a synthetic control approach designed for panel data, we compare the interstate commuting behavior of Wisconsinites and Minnesotans to unaffected intrastate commuters who live and work in the same state, intrastate commuters who live in other large metro areas, and several multi-state metro areas in other states where income tax reciprocity remained intact. Post-dissolution, we find robust evidence that the number of interstate commuters in Wisconsin border counties falls between 3 and 5%, with stronger declines found for younger and middle-income workers.

Foreclosures have large societal costs, and in many cases are more costly to mortgage-holders than the borrower resuming payments. In 2014, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) implemented regulations for mortgage servicers aimed at addressing servicer conduct that may have led to unnecessary foreclosures in the late 2000s. The rule included a new requirement to delay foreclosure until borrowers were at least 120-days delinquent in most cases, up from typically 90 days. I use a large panel of mortgage performance data to estimate the effect of the CFPB rules on foreclosures, and on the ability of delinquent borrowers to recover and become current. I find the rule reduced the incidence of foreclosure within three years, and increased the incidence of recovery. The minimum delinquency requirement seems to have been a factor. In a separate analysis using a unique dataset of detailed loan-level information from seven mortgage servicing firms, borrowers who became 90-days delinquent after the rule went into effect were six percentage points less likely to have foreclosure initiated within two months. I also find that the rule had larger effects on loans that would be more likely to receive a successful loan modification based on mortgage holder policies.

We uniquely examine an upstream mixed duopoly engaging in spatial price discrimination across a continuum of downstream markets. The monopoly firms in those markets face elastic final demand creating double marginalization. The upstream public firm faces a cost disadvantage relative to its private rival that declines as it is partially privatized. We show that the fully public firm improves social welfare relative to a private duopoly when it is not overly inefficient and when differentiation is sufficiently large. We also show that whenever this is the case, there exists an optimal degree of partial privatization that better aligns the trade-off between production costs and pricing distortions.

We develop an urban search-and-matching model. There is a central city, where all firms and jobs are located, and a continuum of peripheral cities. The population endogenously splits between migrants (who relocate from their hometown to the central city), commuters (who travel every day to work in the central city) and home stayers (who remain in their hometown). We prove that the market equilibrium is usually not optimal: a composition externality may generate under- or over-migration compared to the central planner’s solution, which results in under-investment in job vacancies and therefore production. We calibrate the model to the Greater Paris area and quantify this externality. Results suggest over-migration but policy interventions can help reducing inefficiencies.