Regional Science and Urban Economics最新文献

The existence of amenities matters to understanding people’s residential choices. Our theoretical model extends the standard urban model by introducing exogenous amenities to explain population allocation within cities. To estimate the model predictions, we focus on historic amenities using detailed geolocated data for 579 European cities. We analyze how the shape of city centers endowed or not endowed with these amenities is affected. We measure historic amenities with the location of buildings from the Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance–Baroque periods. Our results show that cities with historic buildings in their centers have steeper population density gradients, are more compact and centralized, and have been less affected by the suburbanization processes caused by transportation improvements. Heterogeneity analyses show that the quantity and the quality of historic buildings also matter. Several robustness checks controlling for natural and modern amenities and testing for the spatial scope of these amenities verify our main results.

How do temporary shocks affect the spatial distribution of employment in agriculture? I investigate this question by examining the 1975 frost that damaged coffee trees in Brazil. I find that the frost persistently affected the spatial distribution of employment in agriculture. To identify the effects of the capital destruction from the frost, I compare changes in agricultural employment across local economies that had different coffee tree densities right before the frost and that were differently affected by the extreme weather. The frost resulted in a persistent decline in agricultural employment. The findings are consistent with a history versus expectations model in which fixed and specific capital (such as coffee trees) prevents multiple equilibria despite strategic complementarities in crop choice.

We analyze whether the benefits of work experience that was acquired in denser locations can be explained by the quality of jobs that can be found in agglomerations using administrative data on individual employment biographies of workers in Germany. We find that 79% of the premium for work experience gained in the densest regions can be ascribed to the sectors, tasks and establishments in which experience was acquired. Moreover, we find that foreign and native workers, on average, benefit to a similar extent from dynamic agglomeration effects. However, low-skilled foreign workers receive a lower return to experience gained in dense regions than observationally identical natives. This difference can be explained by the fact that the former gain work experience in lower-quality jobs.

This paper investigates the extent of property tax capitalization in the context of a progressive property tax pilot in Shanghai. I utilize a difference-in-differences approach by comparing neighborhoods with different tax rates before and after the implementation of the property taxes. Neighborhoods with a 0.2 percentage point higher marginal property tax rate experience a roughly 2.73% decrease in housing prices relative to their counterparts. The result reflects that at least 71% of expected property tax liabilities are capitalized into housing prices in a year. These changes also imply a large wealth redistribution as large as 2.68 years of average disposable income across homeowners.

This paper investigates gender as a new source of heterogeneity in the urban wage premium, using a representative panel of 1.2 million worker observations in Great Britain over the period 1999–2019. Pre-2008, women's urban wage premium was more than twice as large as men's (2.8% versus 1.2%), but this difference disappears during the Financial Crisis as women's urban wage premium drastically and permanently drops. This drop is due to the disappearance of women's relative sharing advantages. Moreover, contrary to men, women's urban wage premium is now driven by a wage penalty incurred when changing occupation while transitioning from urban to rural jobs.

Diversity might reduce the ability of small-scale communities to protect local resources through its adverse impact on collective action and individual attachment. Using geocoded data on more than 1500 Grade-3 gas leaks in 2016 across Boston and Cambridge, MA, we show that when a leak emerges in a narrowly-defined area with higher ethno-racial fractionalization it enjoys lower chances of end-year reparation. After accounting for socio-economic and infrastructural factors, our preferred estimate suggests that moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the fractionalization distribution is associated to a 5.7 percentage point decrease in the probability of reparation, compared with an already low average of 3.7%. This result is robust to different definitions of the community surrounding a leak and to the inclusion of competing measures of diversity. Consistent with our framework, social capital appears to be especially lower in communities fragmented across ethno-racial lines. In turn, lower social capital is negatively associated to leak reparation.

While opioid prescribing rates have fallen since 2012, opioid mortality in the United States (US) climbed to record highs in 2022, per CDC reports. In the last decade, evidence emerged that recreational cannabis legislation (RCL) may help mitigate adverse opioid-related outcomes. Yet, the empirical evidence on the relationship between RCL and opioid misuse as a whole is inconsistent and possibly spurious, given common estimation methods. Studies reporting beneficial associations between RCL and opioid mortality tend to avoid the mechanism of change, often assuming mortality benefits stem from substituting cannabis for opioids. We test this relationship using prescription opioid quantities and access to recreational cannabis in the US state of Oregon. Our approach uses within-state variation in distance to recreational dispensary access generated by RCL and prior volumes of legal opioid use to assess the impact of dispensary access on prescription opioids. Results suggest that communities located closer to recreational dispensaries are associated with lower rates of prescription opioids per capita. We also show that reasonable bounds to our primary specification suggest communities located within a mile from a recreational dispensary have prescription opioid rates per capita that are 1.0–3.9 percent lower than surrounding communities. Despite the reduction, we find no evidence that reducing barriers to cannabis access and subsequent declines in prescription opioids are associated with meaningful changes in opioid mortality.

This paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment with the exogenous shock of capital relocation in ancient China from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421 CE during the Ming Dynasty, to investigate the relationship between political governance and urban systems. We constructed a unique historical panel dataset that measures population distributions among Chinese counties spanning over centuries. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, our results reveal that after the capital relocation, the effect of localities' distance to Beijing, the newly established capital at that time, on local population size turns to be significantly negative. Moreover, these effects still persisted in the next dynasty and modern China. Furthermore, the results indicate that the impact of the capital relocation on population distribution occur through two major channels of political governance: delivery and national security. The causal relationship between capital relocation and population distribution is demonstrated to be robust using a variety of identification strategies and robustness checks.

From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, coastal areas of Italy (especially, in the south-west) were subject to attacks by pirates launched from the shores of Northern Africa. This paper studies the long-run impact of these events. We show that in areas that were more exposed to raids, easier-to-defend but less productive locations ended up in being relatively more populated. The consequences of pirates’ attacks were still visible in the first part of the twentieth century and ceased to be statistically significant after the 1960s.