Journal of Urban Economics最新文献

We investigate the heterogeneous impact of the US federal mortgage interest deduction (MID) on households’ location and tenure decisions. We develop a spatial general-equilibrium model featuring non-homothetic preferences in which households can choose whether to claim the MID or a standard tax deduction. Repealing the MID decreases homeownership rates more strongly in central areas because owner-occupiers migrate to the countryside. Welfare increases slightly because positive externalities from less congested housing markets and undistorted tenure decisions outweigh productivity losses in central locations. An increase in standard tax deductions, as implemented in 2018 by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, leads to a similar welfare increase.

We study the effects of a large car scrappage scheme in Germany on new car purchases and local air quality by combining vehicle registration data with data on local air pollutant emissions. For identification we exploit cross-sectional variation across districts in the number of cars eligible for scrappage. The scheme had substantial effects on car purchases and did not simply reallocate demand across time in the short-term. Nevertheless, about half of all subsidized buyers benefited from windfall gains. The renewal of the car stock improved local air quality suggesting substantial mortality benefits that likely exceed the cost of the policy. While policy take-up is somewhat smaller in urban districts, improvements in air quality and health tend to be larger due to a higher car density.

We study the effect of temperature on police-involved civilian deaths in the U.S. from 2000 to 2016. We show that both violent crimes and the number of officers assaulted or killed increase on warmer days ($\ge 17°C$), indicating greater personal danger to officers and bystanders on such days. Consistent with these higher threat levels, we find suggestive evidence that fatal shootings of civilians by officers similarly increase on warmer days. However, when we account for surges in officer–civilian interaction, we find no additional effect of high temperatures on fatal shootings, indicating a lack of behavioral or physiological response on the part of officers. Finally, our results for other causes of death show that, on extremely warm days ($\ge 32°C$), the number of casualties associated with the use of Tasers and physical restraints is significantly higher independently of increased interaction between officers and civilians. The results suggest a need to reevaluate the use of Tasers and physical restraint techniques to prevent unintended deaths.

How has Black Lives Matter (BLM) influenced police lethal force? An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths. This decrease was prominent when protests were large and frequent. Potential mechanisms behind the reduction include police agencies obtaining body-worn cameras to curtail force and a so-called ‘Ferguson effect.’ Fewer property crime arrests, but more reported murders, were associated with local protests, yet the property crime clearance rate fell.

We use data from Reserve Bank of India to study the impact of India’s Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on finance-dependent activity. Loan volumes increase by 20%–30% in districts along GQ and are stronger in industries more dependent upon external finance. Loan growth begins with increases in average branch size and in places with more pre-GQ loan activity. New branch openings come later, consistent with short-run adjustment costs to expanding branch networks. These patterns are not evident in placebo tests using delayed investments in NS-EW highways. Results suggest the depth of initial financial infrastructure shapes how infrastructure investments impact localities.

We introduce a new statistical definition of an immigrant ethnic neighborhood based on a choice model and using the location distribution of natives as a benchmark. We then examine the characteristics of ethnic neighborhoods in the United States using decadal census tract data from 1970 to 2010. We estimate that 43% of the foreign-born population lived in ethnic neighborhoods in 1970, increasing to 67% by 2010. Ethnic neighborhoods have lower average incomes and housing values, and a higher percentage of residents living in rental housing and commuting without a car, than other locations in the city where the same group lives. Neighborhoods vary greatly in size and the population distribution across neighborhoods within a group follows a power law. Most neighborhoods disappear within one or two decades but larger neighborhoods persist longer. Large neighborhoods have a well-defined spatial structure with negative population gradients from the center of the neighborhood and grow primarily through spatial expansion into adjacent locations.

We investigate whether Donald Trump's "Chinese Virus" tweets contributed to the rise of anti-Asian incidents. We find that the number of incidents spiked following Trump's initial “Chinese Virus” tweets and the subsequent dramatic rise in internet search activity for the phrase. Difference-in-differences and event-study analyses leveraging spatial variation indicate that this spike in anti-Asian incidents was significantly more pronounced in counties that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election relative to those that supported Hillary Clinton. We estimate that anti-Asian incidents spiked by approximately 4200% in Trump-supported counties compared to an increase of approximately 200% in Clinton-supported counties.

Tourism accounts for around one tenth of global GDP. We analyze the impact of entertainment media in drawing tourists to filming municipalities (media multiplier) and, in turn, the effect of tourism on local economic development (tourism multiplier). To quantify the media multiplier, we employ a triple-difference empirical strategy exploiting the staggered international release across the EU of Inspector Montalbano, a TV series set in four municipalities of Sicily, a region of Italy. We find that the series release led to a fourfold increase in the number of tourists and boosted tourist expenditure by a factor of 2.5. Furthermore, we provide evidence of positive spillovers in nearby municipalities. To estimate the tourism multiplier, we exploit the interaction between the filming locations and the time-varying share of countries in which the series was aired, to instrument total tourist expenditure at the municipality-time level. Our results show that a 10% increase in total tourist expenditure translates into an increase in municipal income of 4.7%. We also document the impact of tourism on urban dynamics. Namely, tourism increases (decreases) rental and selling prices in the more (less) tourist-attractive areas within municipalities. All in all, the paper suggests that both entertainment media and tourism can be effective tools to boost local economic development.

The diffusion of autonomous vehicles (AVs) will expand the tools to manage congestion. Differently than fleets of traditional vehicles, operators of fleets of AVs will be able to assign different travelers to different routes, potentially inducing different congestion levels (and speed). We look at the effects of the technological transition from traditional to autonomous vehicles. Our model exhibits a unit mass of heterogeneous individuals. Some of them use the services of a fleet, while others do not, and travel independently. With few fleet users, the fleet technology (traditional vs automated vehicles) is immaterial to welfare. On the contrary, when there are many fleet users, we show that, if fleets do not price any individuals out of the market, the differentiation in congestion across routes under the automated fleet is welfare-reducing. When, instead, fleets price some individuals out of the market, the welfare effects of the transition are ambiguous and depend on the interplay between the extent of rationing by both types of fleets and the extent of differentiation by the AVs fleet. Finally, we characterize the tax restoring the first best with AVs. It involves charging different taxes across lanes, starkly different between independent travelers and the fleet. While independent travelers should be charged lane-specific congestion charges, the fleet should be imposed a scheme involving a congestion-based tax and a subsidy.

We study the effect of local unemployment and attitudes towards immigrants at the time of arrival on refugees’ multi-dimensional integration outcomes. We leverage a centralized allocation policy in Germany where refugees were centrally assigned to live in specific counties. To measure sentiments of native residents towards immigrants, we use geo-coded Twitter data, which provides our “negative sentiment index”. Our results show that attitudes towards immigrants are as important as local unemployment rates in shaping refugees’ integration outcomes. A one standard deviation increase in unemployment or in the negative sentiment index predicts five percentage points lower probability of refugees being employed in 2016 to 2018. In additional robustness check, we present an analysis that uses far-right vote share as an alternative measure of sentiments of native residents.