Journal of Urban Economics最新文献

This paper studies how immigration status affects crime reporting. I focus on Deferred Action for Early Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy that temporarily protects youth from deportation and provides work authorization. For identification, I compare the reporting behavior of victims who are more likely to be undocumented around the policy’s age-eligibility cut-off over time. I find that DACA eligibility increased victims’ likelihood of reporting crimes to the police and provide evidence consistent with DACA reducing victims’ fear of deportation. Overall, the results suggest that immigrant legalization increases engagement with police.

Previous work on agglomeration economies ignores the built environment. This paper shows that the built environment matters, especially for commercial sectors that dominate city centers. Buildings are specialized beyond random assignment, in part because externality-generating anchor tenants skew a building's other tenants towards the anchor's industry. An anchor elsewhere on the blockface has a much weaker effect, and one that is weaker still if across the street, suggesting rapidly attenuating agglomeration economies. Attenuation is pronounced for retail and information-oriented office industries but is absent for manufacturing. Building managers have incentives and capacities to partly internalize local externalities, contributing to urban productivity.

This study examines the role played by real estate agents in fraudulent activities in China’s housing market. We show that agents contribute to the formation of Yin–Yang contracts and the magnitude of resulting tax evasion through two possible mechanisms: the learning-by-doing effect and the peer effect. Agents’ cumulative experience allows them to discover local registration authorities’ monitoring capability and strategically register prices close to the internal guideline prices. Moreover, agents’ involvement in tax evasion is significantly affected by the tax evasion behaviors of their peers. The difference-in-differences analyses across two policy shocks show that the involvement of experienced real estate agents exacerbates the magnitude of tax evasion during periods of frequent government policy adjustments.

Shelter is a large share of household expenditures and therefore has a large weight in inflation measurement. Because rich and poor households tend to make different housing and location choices, does the shelter component of inflation differ across the income distribution? I calculate rent growth for households in each quintile of the income distribution from 1985 to 2021 and find modestly lower rent growth for lower-income groups. However, because lower-income households spend a larger fraction of total expenditures on housing, I find little difference across groups in headline inflation. Therefore, different housing and location choices have not generated materially different shelter components of inflation across the income distribution.

This paper estimates the effect of enacting a new zoning code in Philadelphia on urban development and crime. The new zoning code was intended to ease regulatory burdens for property development and land use changes, but the law allowed city council members to keep prerogative over urban development in their districts. The council district prerogative created arbitrary geographic discontinuities in the ability of the zoning code to promote urban development. Using a difference-in-discontinuities design, we find that the new zoning regulation caused a 35 percent reduction in land use zoning changes and building permits in council districts less friendly to urban development relative to neighboring districts. The decline in urban development had no short-term effect on crime. Construction projects and land-use changes appear to occur in the most densely populated areas, suggesting that council districts less inclined to urban development prevent residential construction in areas that would otherwise be a source for new residential housing development.

Firms should use all available information to anticipate future tax rates. Firm mobility is one source of such information. We first establish theoretically that expected future tax rates are higher in jurisdictions attractive for immobile firms (such as wind power plants or resource extracting firms). Fewer mobile firms enter in such a jurisdiction. Building on previous empirical evidence that German municipalities raise tax rates following the entry of immobile firms, we confirm that firms use this information to anticipate future tax rates. In the jurisdictions with the largest expected future tax rate increases, 10% fewer firms enter.

I apply a Tiebout model of multiple local jurisdictions to study the political economy and welfare effects of state limitations on the taxing powers of local governments, investigating the effects of such restrictions on housing markets, community composition, and the types of expenditures undertaken by local governments. The Tiebout model in this paper is distinguished by voters choosing values of multiple local policy (tax and expenditure) instruments, a mixture of renters and owners residing in each community, and different degrees of household mobility. I characterize and provide sufficient conditions for voting equilibrium even with multiple policy instruments and varying housing tenure by developing a novel application of the Besley and Coate (1997) model of representative democracy. The different degrees of household mobility following the introduction of tax limits have significant impacts on equilibrium values, the predicted level of political support, and the welfare effects associated with these tax limits. In addition, almost none of the tax limits increase overall welfare, even though many gain majority support. The only case that is predicted to have majority support and increases welfare is when all households are mobile, head and income taxes have previously been constrained, and property taxes are then limited. These results accord well with the hypothesis of Vigdor (2001)—that much political support for tax limits comes from a desire by individuals to limit taxes in localities other than their own.

We develop a model that describes how city characteristics affect the volatility of real estate rents and values. The model includes agglomeration externalities, which amplify the effect of productivity shocks on population growth and rents, as well as city characteristics that constrain population growth. While growth constraints make rents more subject to productivity shocks because of the inelastic supply, they can also suppress the benefits of agglomeration, which has the effect of decreasing the sensitivity of rents to productivity shocks. Our dynamic model exhibits persistent rent growth and rent-to-value ratios that vary across cities and over time. In particular, we show that productivity shocks have a larger initial effect on rents in more constrained cities, but a greater long-term effect in less constrained cities.

It is a popular belief that police brutality incidents increase crime either by causing retaliation (i.e. rioting) or depolicing. But, these incidents may also deter crime, which makes the sign of the effect of brutality and crime ambiguous. In this paper, I build a simple model that highlights this theoretical ambiguity and provides guidance on how to use the joint effects of brutality on crime and arrests to distinguish between these three mechanisms: retaliation, depolicing, and deterrence. Using data on excessive force complaints in Chicago from 2011 to 2015, I exploit variation in the timing and location of serious excessive force incidents to estimate the effect of police brutality on crime rates and arrests rates within Chicago. I find that communities that experience serious brutality incidents experience a 2.1% increase in total crime in the month following the incident. These local crime rate increases are roughly five times larger when the victim is black and the officer is white (i.e. when incidents are racially charged). Racially charged incidents also result in large short-term increases in arrest rates (especially for violent crimes). These results are inconsistent with deterrence at the local level and highlight that the joint criminogenic and enforcement response to police brutality varies substantially by the racial composition of those involved. In addition, I also document some evidence of small post-incident city-wide declines in crime and arrests, highlighting the possibility that different mechanisms may matter at different scales of analysis. Contrary to public perception, I do not any find clear evidence of depolicing.

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.