Negative house price co-movements and US recessions
Publication date: Available online 1 July 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Charlotte Christiansen, Jonas N. Eriksen, Stig V. MøllerAbstractWe investigate the relation between large negative house price co-movements in the cross-section of US cities and the national business cycle. The occurrences of large negative house price co-movements across cities cluster over time and these clusters are closely linked to NBER recession dates. A simple co-movement measure that aggregates large negative city-level house price returns reliably predicts future recession periods. Weighting cities according to po...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - July 3, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

How small are small markets? Local market size for child care services
Publication date: Available online 26 June 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Astrid Pennerstorfer, Dieter PennerstorferAbstractIn this article, we propose an innovative way of delineating local markets based on easily accessible data. We apply this concept to the day care industry and investigate providers' location choices relative to local market characteristics to evaluate the widespread presumption that local markets for child care services are geographically very small. Using a panel of all day care centers for the metropolitan region of Vienna, Austria, for nearly a decade, as well as geograp...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 27, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Public transport and urban pollution
Publication date: Available online 23 June 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Rainald BorckAbstractThis paper studies the effect of public transport policies on urban pollution. It uses a quantitative equilibrium model with residential choice and mode choice. Pollution comes from commuting and residential energy use. The model parameters are calibrated to replicate key variables for American metropolitan areas. In the counterfactual, I study how free public transport coupled with increasing transit speed affects the equilibrium. In the baseline simulation, total pollution falls by 0.4%, as decreasin...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 24, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Heterogeneous labor and agglomeration over generations
Publication date: Available online 23 June 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Ryusuke IharaAbstractProductivity in cities is enhanced by diverse workers from various regions and countries. However, agglomeration can homogenize the workers over time. To investigate the transition of labor diversity in the agglomeration process, this paper presents a two-region non-overlapping generations model. Workers are assumed to be differentiated in terms of their birthplaces, and the distribution of the birthplaces depends on their previous generation's residency choices. As a main result, this paper shows that...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 24, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Do tax incentives affect business location and economic development? Evidence from state film incentives
Publication date: Available online 20 June 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Patrick ButtonAbstractI estimate the impacts of recently-popular U.S. state film incentives on filming location, film industry employment, wages, and establishments, and spillover impacts on related industries. I compile a detailed database of incentives, matching this with TV series and feature film data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Studio System, and establishment and employment data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and Country Business Patterns. I compare these outcomes in states before a...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 21, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

High-skilled immigration and native task specialization in U.S. cities
This study examines the effect of high-skilled immigration on the occupational structure of native-born workers in U.S. cities. Results indicate that increases in foreign college workers in STEM occupations, where they hold a comparative advantage over native-born workers, increase the specialization of college natives in social-intensive tasks. Consistent with the productivity effect of task specialization, I find no evidence of displacement effects but do find evidence of positive wage effects of foreign STEM flows on college natives, particularly for those in high-social occupations. Identification strategy relies on an...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 18, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

The disutility of commuting? The effect of gender and local labor markets
Publication date: Available online 10 June 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Nikita Jacob, Luke Munford, Nigel Rice, Jennifer RobertsAbstractStandard economic theory postulates that commuting is a choice behavior undertaken when compensated through either lower rents or greater amenities in the housing market or through higher wages in the labor market. By exploiting exogenous shocks to commuting time, this paper investigates the impact on well-being of increased commuting. Ceteris paribus, exogenous increases in commuting time are expected to lower well-being. We find this holds for women but not ...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 12, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Editorial Board
Publication date: May 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics, Volume 76Author(s): (Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics)
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 4, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Editorial introduction to the special issue entitled: Spatial econometrics: New methods and applications
Publication date: May 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics, Volume 76Author(s): Zhenlin Yang (Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics)
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - June 4, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Gender segregation within neighborhoods
Publication date: Available online 31 May 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Gregorio Caetano, Vikram MaheshriAbstractHomophily generates segregation, which reduces diversity in peer groups and leads to narrower social interactions. Using novel data from Foursquare, a popular mobile app that documents the activity of millions of people, we document robust, highly localized gender segregation within neighborhoods: most venues (e.g., shops, restaurants, parks, museums) in eight major US cities are highly gender segregated, and over half of the gender segregation across cities occurs within Census bloc...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - May 31, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Residential parking costs and car ownership: Implications for parking policy and automated vehicles
Publication date: Available online 30 May 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Francis Ostermeijer, Hans RA. Koster, Jos van OmmerenAbstractResidents are often offered on-street parking at a fraction of the market price which may cause excess car ownership. However, residential parking costs are difficult to observe, so we propose an approach to estimate implicit residential parking costs and then examine the effect of these costs on household car ownership. We apply our approach to the four largest metropolitan areas of the Netherlands. Our results indicate that for city centres, annual residential p...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - May 30, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

City size and the risk of being unemployed. Job pooling vs. job competition
Publication date: Available online 19 May 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Carl Gaigné, Mathieu Sanch-MaritanAbstractWe study the relationship between city size and the risk of being unemployed. We introduce a new mechanism, job pooling, as a source of agglomeration economies in a model of risk sharing with an imperfect labor market and risk-neutral agents. Despite competition across workers for jobs in the largest cities (job competition), workers tend to be located in large cities because tight labor markets yield income gains from the sharing of firms among workers that do not know ex ante the...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - May 19, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Commuting and land use in a city with bottlenecks: Theory and evidence
We present a new monocentric city framework that combines a discrete urban space with multiple Vickrey (1969)-type bottlenecks. The model illustrates commute scheduling patterns by residents at different locations in the city. We confirm empirically the relationship between residential location and commute timing choices predicted by the model. In particular, we find that commuters traveling a longer distance tend to arrive at work at the edge of the morning peak time while commuters with a shorter distance tend to arrive at the peak time. We also characterize the optimal policy of congestion toll and analyzes its impact o...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - May 17, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

The effect of education on health: Evidence from the 1997 compulsory schooling reform in Turkey
Publication date: Available online 14 May 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Badi H. Baltagi, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Haci M. KaratasAbstractThis paper analyzes the relationship between education and health outcomes using a natural experiment in Turkey. The compulsory schooling increased from 5 to 8 years in 1997. This increase was accompanied by a massive construction of classrooms and recruitment of teachers in a differential rate across regions. As in previous studies, we confirm that the 1997 reform substantially increased education in Turkey. Using the number of new middle school class openings...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - May 16, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research

Learning from man or machine: Spatial fixed effects in urban econometrics
Publication date: Available online 15 May 2019Source: Regional Science and Urban EconomicsAuthor(s): Åvald Sommervoll, Dag Einar SommervollAbstractEconometric models with spatial fixed effects (FE) require some kind of spatial aggregation. This aggregation may be based on postcode, school district, county or some other spatial subdivision. Common sense would suggest that the less aggregated, the better inasmuch as aggregation over larger areas tends to gloss over systematic spatial variation. On the other hand, low spatial aggregation results in thin data sets and potentially noisy spatial fixed effects. We show, however,...
Source: Regional Science and Urban Economics - May 16, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research