Journal of Urban Economics最新文献

Canonical urban models postulate transportation cost as a key element in determining urban spatial structure. This paper examines how road rationing policies impact the spatial distribution of households around transit centers using rich micro data on housing transactions and resident demographics in Beijing. We find that Beijing’s road rationing policy significantly increased the demand for housing near subway stations. The premium for proximity is stable in the periods prior to the driving restriction, but shifts significantly in the aftermath of the policy. The composition of households living close to subway stations shifts towards slightly wealthier households. Our findings suggest that city-wide road rationing policies can have the unintended consequence of limiting access to public transit for lower income individuals.

We study the consequences of landlord–tenant laws on quality and prices in the rental housing market. We use the staggered introduction of Canadian Residential Tenancy Acts to study the consequences of a landlord–tenant reform that reduced tenants’ litigation costs and improved their bargaining power through mandatory contractual terms. To do so, we employ the difference-in-differences approach to estimate the average treatment effect on a repeated-cross section of households, controlling for income and family structure in five cities. The estimates imply that the reform led to a decline of 2.2 percentage points in the probability of a major defect, with no measurable effect on rent prices or homeownership rates. The average treatment effects are concentrated within families with children, who face greater costs to moving in response to property damage. The results are consistent with a stylized model in which a reduction in litigation costs allows the tenant to more cheaply recover on damages when moving costs are high, with second-generation rent controls limiting increases in rent prices charged by the landlord.

This paper provides novel evidence on the impact of public transport subsidies on air pollution. We obtain causal estimates by leveraging a unique policy intervention in Germany that temporarily reduced nationwide prices for regional public transport to a monthly flat rate price of 9 Euros. Using DiD estimation strategies on air pollutant data, we show that this intervention causally reduced a benchmark air pollution index by more than eight percent and, after its termination, increased again. Our results illustrate that public transport subsidies – especially in the context of spatially constrained cities – offer a viable alternative for policymakers and city planers to improve air quality, which has been shown to crucially affect health outcomes.

Quantitative analysis of Black business districts and evidence on the magnitude of social change leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in particular as it relates to the accessibility of public accommodations, is limited. We combine newly digitized data on the precise geocoded location of nearly 6000 Green Book establishments – public accommodations that were friendly towards African American clientele – across major urban areas with existing and new sources of data on social change to understand the dynamics of Black-friendly businesses within cities during the middle of the twentieth century. In doing so, we document a new set of facts. First, we show that the location and growth of Green Book establishments responded to economic forces. Second, we show that there was a large increase in the number of Green Book establishments in cities between 1939 and 1955. Third, for Green Book establishments located in cities for which the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew residential security maps, the vast majority (nearly 70 percent) were located in the lowest-grade, redlined neighborhoods. And finally, we show that 1950s urban renewal projects were related to the contraction of non-discriminatory businesses. Collectively, these facts suggest that more research on Black-owned and Black-friendly businesses is needed to fully understand the economics of urban change in the twentieth century.

Downs (1962) claimed a “Law”: that expressways lower congestion even though they reach maximum traffic flow. In urban economics since Strotz (1965), road capacity is measured by road width, and congestion as the delay in travel: wider roads lower congestion. Duranton and Turner (2011), in an econometric study, atypically defined congestion, not as delay in travel, but as aggregate vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) relative to the aggregate length of roads, concluding that roads are unlikely to relieve congestion. We first provide the theory behind “Downs's Law”. Then, in a series of theoretical models, we endogenize rent, income, the value of time, leisure, Marshallian productivity, consumption-linked trips, road costs, spatial detail, and a suburb-to-city expressway competing with existing roads. In each case we prove that adding more road capacity lowers congestion and increases utility in the short run when city population is fixed; and lowers congestion in the long run too despite induced travel or population growth. Aggregate travel cost and VKT rise or fall, depending on how much congestion is lowered, on the cost elasticity of travel demand, on location-based income and substitution effects, and on which roads are widened.

The Black Death killed 40% of Europe’s population between 1347 and 1352, making it one of the largest shocks in the history of mankind. Using a novel dataset that provides information on spatial variation in plague mortality at the city level, as well as various identification strategies, we explore the short-run and long-run impacts of Black Death mortality on city growth. On average, cities recovered their pre-plague populations within two centuries. However, aggregate convergence masked heterogeneity in urban recovery. Both of these facts are consistent with populations returning disproportionally to locations endowed with more rural and urban fixed factors of production. Land suitability and natural and historical trade networks played a vital role in recovery. Our study highlights the role played by the Black Death and physical and economic geography in determining the relative size of European cities.

We study a natural experiment in Argentina, where low-income women were selected through a lottery system to receive a house and a heavily subsidized long-term mort- gage. We exploit the random assignment to estimate the causal link between sub- sidized homeownership programs and intimate partner violence (IPV). Our analysis utilizes administrative records of the population of women applicants to assess the im- pact of homeownership on IPV, differentiating between women under joint-ownership contracts with their partners and those under single-ownership contracts. We find that the program causes an increase in IPV for women under joint-ownership contracts and a decrease in IPV for women under single-ownership contracts. Our results highlight the importance of considering the design of subsidized homeownership programs and explicitly incorporating measures to facilitate exit from conflicting relationships.

We provide the first evidence on the rate at which spatial variation in all-cause mortality risk is capitalized into US housing prices. Using a hedonic framework, we recover the annual implicit cost of a 0.1 percentage-point reduction in mortality risk among older Americans and find that this cost is less than $3453 for a 67 year old and decreasing with age to less than $629 for an 87 year old. These estimates, while similar to estimates from the market for health care, are far below comparable estimates from markets for labor and automobiles, suggesting that the housing market provides an alternative, substantially cheaper channel for reducing mortality risk. We find this conclusion to be robust to a wide range of econometric model specifications, including accounting for associated expenditures on property taxes and the physical and financial costs of moving.