Journal of Urban Economics最新文献

This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of highway maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia’s two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990–2007, we find evidence that better roads help manufacturers create new jobs, enabling worker transitions out of informal employment, and increasing labor income. Road quality also changes the cost of living, reducing perishable food prices but also raising housing prices. We estimate the elasticity of household welfare with respect to road quality to be 0.1 and the benefit/cost ratio for road maintenance investments to be 2.3.

We examine the effect of real estate owned property rehabilitations on neighboring property prices. We find that house prices around a rehabilitated property increase 2.3 percentage points following the rehabilitation. Moreover, the average rehabilitation generates aggregate welfare benefits 3.8 times greater than the amount invested. Rehabilitation externalities are stronger for longer rehabilitations and greater rehabilitation investments, and they are prevalent even in areas with high rates of foreclosures. The spillover effect of rehabilitations operates through their salience rather than through a reduction in the supply of distressed properties, through property appraisals, or through homebuyers with higher income moving into the neighborhood.

This paper investigates the reversibility of the effects of transport infrastructure investments, based on a programme that removed much of the rail network in Britain during the mid-20th century. We find that a 10% loss in rail access between 1950 and 1980 caused a persistent 3% decline in local population relative to unaffected areas, implying that the 1 in 5 places most exposed to the cuts saw 24 percentage points less population growth than the 1 in 5 places that were least exposed. The cuts reduced local jobs and shares of skilled workers and young people.

How do people choose work and residence locations when commuting is costly and productivity spillovers, increasing returns to scale, or first nature advantage, reward the concentration of employment. We describe such an equilibrium city in a simple geography populated by agents with heterogenous preferences over workplace–residence pairs. The behavior of equilibrium cities is more complex than previously understood. Heterogeneous location preferences are sufficient for equilibrium centralization of employment and residence. Increasing returns and productivity spillovers can disperse employment. An increase in commuting costs may decentralize residence and employment. Our results shed new light on classical urban economics and are important for our understanding of quantitative spatial models.

What role do local officials’ incentives play in regional economic growth? How do local officials behave under promotion pressure? This paper studies the unintended impact of mayors’ promotion incentives on regional economic growth and subnational-level GDP manipulation in China. We employ a regression discontinuity design that accounts for age restrictions in deciding promotions for mayors. We find that when GDP performance is prioritized in officials’ promotion evaluations (before 2013), mayors’ promotion incentives significantly increase the statistical GDP growth rate by 3.4 percentage points. However, their effects on nighttime light and other non-manipulable real economic growth indicators are close to zero. This gap can be attributed to GDP manipulation under our empirical framework. The above pattern no longer persists after 2013, when the role of GDP statistics in mayoral promotions was reduced. Our findings indicate that GDP manipulation makes performance-based competition between mayors devolve into a data manipulation game.

A primary rationale for public financing of schools is that education fosters civic engagement. However, existing studies examining the relationship between schooling and civic engagement have focused exclusively on how educational attainment affects political activity. We provide evidence on how school spending affects volunteerism and voting. Exploiting variation in U.S. court-ordered and legislative school finance reforms and using survey data from the NCES Secondary Longitudinal Studies Program, we find that exogenous increases in school spending led to increases in the probability that young adults volunteer, the amount of time they spend volunteering, and the probability of being registered to vote.

In this study, we find a negative effect of unexploded ordnance (UXO) on the geographical density of foreign direct investment and large firms in Vietnam. A 1 % increase in the proportion of UXO-contaminated areas leads to a 0.69 % relative decrease in the density of FDI firms within districts. Point estimates for the elasticity of the density of joint-venture FDI firms and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) due to UXO are smaller, equal to -0.56 and -0.36. Moreover, we also find that a 1 % increase in the proportion of UXO-contaminated areas leads to a 0.38 % relative decrease in the intensity of nighttime light.

The United States has seen a drastic shift in the fuels used for electricity production. We study the consequences of these changes on air pollution and test scores. Using data covering the near-universe of students and a shift-share instrument that interacts local fuel shares with national growth rates, we show that each one-unit increase in particulate pollution reduces test scores by 0.016 standard deviations. Our estimates indicate that pollution reductions from electricity generation raised nationwide test scores by 0.03 standard deviations. As pollution declines were largest in majority-black districts, the black–white test score gap fell by 0.01 standard deviations.

This paper examines the effects of relaxing land-use regulations on housing supply and rents at the local intra-city level. We apply a staggered difference-in-difference model, exploiting exogenous differences in the treatment timing of zoning plan reforms as identifying variation. Increasing the allowable floor-to-area ratio (FAR), i.e., upzoning, significantly increases the living space and housing units by approximately 9% in the subsequent five to ten years. This effect is stronger for larger upzonings, for rasters where zoning is binding, and where rents are high. Furthermore, upzoning leads to no difference in hedonic rents between upzoned and later-upzoned rasters. These results show that upzoning is a viable policy for increasing housing affordability. However, the effects depend on the upzoning policy design and take several years to materialize.

Construction on low elevation coastal zones is risky for both residents and taxpayers who bail them out. To investigate this construction, we analyze spatially disaggregated data covering the entire US Atlantic and Gulf coasts. We find that the 1990 housing stock reflects historical avoidance of locations prone to sea level rise (SLR) and flooding, but net new construction from 1990–2010 was similar in SLR-prone locations and safer ones; and within densely built coastal areas, net new construction was higher in SLR-prone locations. These findings are difficult to rationalize as mere products of moral hazard or imperfect information, suggesting that people build on risky locations to benefit from nearby urban agglomerations. To explain our findings, we develop a simple model of a monocentric coastal city, which we use to explore the consequences of sea level rise. This model helps explain cities’ role in expanding flood risks, and how future sea level rise may reshape coastal cities, creating significant challenges for policymakers.