Journal of Urban Economics最新文献

This paper exploits the increase in immigrants from new European member states to test for the presence of strategic interactions in the municipal allocation of social transfers targeted at education services. The results of this analysis, conducted on all Italian municipalities over the 2003–2015 period, point to the presence of spatial interactions between neighbouring municipalities and indicate that this mimicking is more pronounced in municipalities guided by mayors who can be re-elected, in electoral years compared to other years of the term, in municipalities where a higher share of low-income households live, and in municipalities characterized by low levels of social and civic capital.

This paper explores the roles of agglomeration economies and human capital externalities in accounting for productivity variations across sub-national areas in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries. We estimate positive elasticities of productivity with respect to density. While heterogeneity exists across countries, the estimated agglomeration elasticities for the region are comparable to those estimated in the literature for high-income countries. Including human capital measures reduces the estimated agglomeration elasticities for several countries in our sample. We also find that human capital externalities play a stronger role in explaining spatial productivity differentials than agglomeration economies in the region. By providing comparable estimates of the strength of agglomeration economies and human capital externalities for many non-high-income countries, the paper considerably expands knowledge on the determinants of urban productivity.

We study the firm-level responses to a substantial increase in transportation costs in the wake of a quasi-experiment that introduced tolls in a subset of Portuguese highways. Exploiting a unique dataset encompassing the universe of Portuguese private firms, we find that the introduction of tolls caused a substantial decrease in turnover ($-10.2$%) and productivity ($-4.3$%) in treated firms vis-à-vis firms in the comparison group. In response to the tolls, firms substantially cut employment-related expenses and purchases of other inputs. Labor costs were reduced by both employment cuts and a decrease in average wages. While firms did not increase inventory, there is some evidence for increased firm exit, in particular by firms in tradables sectors.

This paper examines the impact of the Interstate Highway System, constructed between 1950 and 1990 in the United States (US), on racial segregation. To provide causal estimates, I use the 1947 plan of the Interstate Highway System, a variant of the 1947 plan that connects city center pairs in this plan through shortest-distance and exploration routes in the 16th-19th century, as the instruments for actual highways built. Empirical results from census tracts in the US show that the construction of highways led to sorting along racial lines. I find strong evidence of heterogeneous effects based on the initial black population. I do not find any impact of highways on neighborhoods which have a lower share of initial black population. However, there is an increase in the share of the black population for neighborhoods located in close proximity to highways, and which have a higher share of the initial black population. This increase is driven by the white population moving out and black population moving into these neighborhoods. I demonstrate that whites that moved out of neighborhoods, now commute to work, made possible due to access provided by highways. These residents were on average better educated and had a higher income than the residents moving into the neighborhoods. The reasons for this movement are disamenities emanating from highways, and racial preferences for social interactions. Finally, I show that this relationship between highways and segregation is also observed at the aggregate level. Empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through the central city leads to 0.02 units increase in the dissimilarity index for the metropolitan area.

In France, childless adults younger than 25 face hard-to-meet eligibility conditions to enroll in the minimum income program. The restrictive requirements generate a “jump” in the number of recipients at ages around 25. We use a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design to assess the impact of the French minimum income program (RSA) on users of accommodation and meal distribution services. We find that the RSA benefit reduces the homelessness rate by 20% among young adults aged 22 to 27. This result is driven by new RSA recipients who have started paying partial rent to third parties, and the probability of becoming a regular tenant increases after age 26. We simulate the effects of lowering the program’s minimum age eligibility on the probability of being homeless. Our findings suggest that in programs directed at homeless individuals, around 60% of expenditures are offset by savings in social assistance costs to the homeless.

How does return migration from the US to Mexico affect local workers? Return migrants increase the local labor supply, potentially hurting local workers. However, having been exposed to a more advanced U.S. economy, they may also carry human capital that benefits non-migrants. Using an instrument based on involuntary return migration, we find that, whereas workers who share returnees’ occupations experience a fall in wages, workers in other occupations see their wages rise. These effects are, however, transitory and restricted to the city-industry receiving the returnees. In contrast, returnees permanently alter a city’s long-run industrial composition, by raising employment levels in the local industries that hire them.

We use archaeological data from ancient settlements of three different historical eras on a Greek island to construct novel measures of consumption. Using these, we show that the shares of high-quality consumption goods were relatively more concentrated closer to the center of nucleated settlements as compared to low-quality consumption goods. There is no such pattern in a placebo settlement. In this unique setting, these quality gradients may reflect differences in household consumption baskets across these settlements. We argue that some alternative, trade or production based hypotheses for such gradients can be weakly ruled out based on our data and archaeological sources.

Based on mobile phone records for 71 million users and location tracking information for one million users over almost three years, this study examines the labor market impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in China’s Guangdong province, whose GDP is larger than that of all but the top 12 countries in the world. Using a standard difference-in-differences framework, our analysis shows dramatic and protracted effects of the pandemic on the labor market: it increased unemployment by 72% and unemployment benefits claims by 57% even after the full reopening in 2020 relative to their levels in the same period in 2019. The impact was also highly heterogeneous, with women, workers older than 40, and migrants being more affected. Cities that rely more on export or that have a higher share of the hospitality industry in GDP but a lower share of the finance and healthcare industries experienced a more pronounced increase in unemployment. The lingering impact likely reflects the global transmission of the pandemic’s effects through the supply chain and trade channels.

This paper proposes a novel approach to evaluate location decisions for public facilities. The approach addresses, not only the standard distance-minimizing problem, but also the endogenous location decisions of individuals. The paper develops a quantifiable general equilibrium model with endogenous (residential and commercial) densities, housing prices, commutes to work, as well as to public/private facilities. The framework is applied to the case of secondary schools in Paris’ greater region at a 1km${}^2$ geographical scale. The analysis reveals that the observed location decisions made between 2001 and 2015 underestimate the endogenous reaction of individuals. A more decentralized strategy is predicted to increase welfare growth by 10 percent, reduce density in Paris’ center, and shorten commuting times to school globally.