01  

Aaron Weisbrod (Brown University)

题目：Housing Booms and Urban Frictions: The Impact of the 1917 Halifax Explosion on Local Property Values

摘要：This paper uses the 1917 Halifax Explosion as a natural experiment to study the effects of two important urban frictions on local property values: the durability of buildings and the coordination problems associated with re-planning. The structure of this particular explosion allows for division of the reconstruction efforts into two areas. In the first, the street network remained the same and the housing stock was updated. In the second, there was both a significant re-planning of the area and an updating of the housing stock. This paper uses areas sufficiently outside of the explosion area as a control group to estimate the impact of this reconstruction on property values. These estimates show large property value increases resulting from this reconstruction, with the re-planning and the updating of the housing stock together generating significantly more value than the updating of the housing stock alone. The total estimated value increase is significantly less than any reasonable cost benchmark for the reconstruction in this example however, despite significant estimated positive spillovers into the unaffected areas. This is because the Halifax Explosion occurred in a less dense area on the edge of the city, which limited the reconstruction’s positive spillover effects. This reconstruction also caused increases in the earnings of the individuals who chose to locate within these areas after the explosion. I present suggestive evidence that this is driven by the re-sorting of higherearnings individuals into these areas as opposed to localized post-reconstruction efficiency gains.

02

Aleksandar Petreski (Jönköping University, Sweden)

题目：Spatial-temporal asymmetry, shock and memory: housing transaction prices in Sweden

摘要：This paper is an empirical investigation of transmission of volatility shocks of property prices across the space and time. By using transactions data instead of indices and averaged data, the problem of smoothing and reducing the total variance in the data is avoided. Data on infrequent non-repetitive housing transactions is modeled with a spatial-temporal form of ARCH/GARCH. Spatial-temporal weights allow past errors and past conditional variances in neighboring locations to have differential impact on current variance estimated at separate locations. Estimated parameters based on municipal housing transactions from the town of Jönköping in Sweden, from 2015 through 2019, show positive memory effect along with positive shock and confirm the assumption of spatial-temporal persistence in the variance. The market for houses has different spatial-temporal dynamics compared with the market for apartments, showing lower memory (persistence) of the past close-by shocks. Except for the general apartments market, findings shows that memory of the price shocks is not so dependent on the geographical distance. A spatial only asymmetry of price shocks is detected.

03

Andrew Simon (University of Michigan)

题目：Public Good Spillovers and Fiscal Centralization: Evidence from Community College Expansions

摘要：Centralization of public goods with spillovers limits free-riding and increases provision, but general equilibrium household responses to changes in net benefits across space can undermine its value. This paper considers the trade-off for community colleges. After geographic expansions across Texas, communities that joined and their neighbors saw increased aggregate home values and prices, suggesting that more centralization is welfare-enhancing. I estimate a general equilibrium structural model to understand the optimal size of the tax base in Austin, TX. Under centralization, 12 percent more households pay college taxes and average yearly household welfare increases by $29 ($23M for the MSA). However, complete centralization is not socially optimal because the services are spatially concentrated, and the resulting household sorting adversely affects the housing market. A one community smaller than centralization tax base raises average welfare by an additional $222, mainly reflecting the general equilibrium housing market effects.

04

Avichal Mahajan (Université de Genève)

题目：Highways and segregation

摘要：In the paper, I examine 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.

05

Björn Brey (Nottingham)

题目：The long-run gains from the early adoption of electricity

摘要：This paper explores the effect of the early adoption of technology on local economic development. While timing and intensity of technology adoption are key drivers of economic divergence across countries, the initial impact of new technologies within advanced countries has been incredibly illusive. Resolving this puzzle, this paper documents that the early adoption of electricity across Switzerland was conducive to local economic development not just in the short-run, but also in the long-run. Exploiting exogenous variation in the potential to produce electricity from waterpower, this paper finds that electricity adoption at the end of the 19th century led to local differences in structural transformation. However, despite access to electricity becoming quickly universal in the early 20th century, due to the expansion of the electricity grid, economic development did not converge across areas. Instead, areas which adopted electricity early continue to be more industrialized and have higher incomes today. In particular, the geographical distribution of the newly emerging and innovative chemical industry was shaped by early electricity adoption, while employment gains through the building and operation of new power plants themselves were mostly short-lived. The main mechanism through which differences in economic development persist in the long-run is through increased human capital accumulation and innovation, rather than persistent differences in the way electricity is used.

06

Brendan Shanks (LMU Munich)

题目：Land Use Regulations and Housing Development: Evidence from Tax Parcels and Zoning Bylaws in Massachusetts

摘要：Land use regulations come in a wide variety of forms and govern how development occurs. They restrict housing development resulting in housing supply being less responsive to demand shocks. Yet little is known on what facets of residential development are most impacted, hindered by lack of comprehensive data on land use regulation stringency. I address this shortcoming by compiling a novel measure of land use regulation based on applying natural language processing techniques to over 40,000 pages of zoning bylaw texts. Utilizing a spatial regression discontinuity design around municipal borders, I find that stringent land use regulations reduce housing supply primarily through increasing the land usage per house. Strongly regulated localities do not compensate by developing more land overall. These results highlight how regulations like minimum lot sizes and setback requirements pose barriers to housing development in high-growth regions.

07

Christoph Albert (CEMFI)

题目：Immigration and Spatial Equilibrium: the Role of Expenditures in the Country of Origin

摘要：We document that immigrants in the US strongly concentrate in expensive cities, their earnings relative to natives are lower in these cities, and both these patterns are stronger for immigrants originating from countries with lower price levels. To explain these empirical regularities, we propose a novel mechanism: a part of immigrants’ income is used for consumption in their origin country, which implies that they are less affected by local price levels than natives. We incorporate this consumption channel as a driver of immigrants’ location choices in a quantitative spatial equilibrium model and show that it performs well at predicting population changes across US cities during the 1990s. Counterfactual simulations suggest that due to the consumption channel, immigration as led to large population gains in expensive cities, from which some natives were crowded out. Based on our framework, we develop a new instrument for immigrant shocks and use it to test the predictions on native internal relocation responses. Finally, we employ the model to evaluate the impact of immigration on aggregate productivity, which we find to increase as the population distribution is shifted towards more productive cities.

08

Desen Lin (Penn)

题目：Housing Search and Rental Market Intermediation

摘要：Rental brokers as the matchmakers between tenants and landlords contribute 80% of the rental listings in certain markets, but how they smooth the search friction and transmit policy impacts is not well understood. This paper is the first to use a listing-agent matched data set from an online platform to show the heterogeneous impact of the listing capacity of a broker, i.e. the agent size, on the rental market outcomes. I document that brokers with greater listing capacity are related to lower rents and shorter listing duration. The dispersion cannot be fully explained by the amenity difference of rentals and points to a sizable agent impact that a broker with greater capacity lists a rental at a lower rent. I develop a search model that features a search-and-matching process in which the capacity constraints of brokers interact with the tenant coordination friction. The capacity constraints differentiate brokers’ ability to coordinate tenant search. The smaller rent premium for listings by larger brokers reflects the capacity benefit that larger brokers coordinate tenant search better by reducing the likelihood of facing a binding capacity constraint. An endogenous agent distribution of the listing capacity, which summarizes how frictional the rental market is, arises in the model. I evaluate the counterfactual effects of two rental market policies. First, I show that expanding the brokerage sector will not benefit tenants in the search process. As the mean agent size decreases, the rental market becomes more frictional. Second, I evaluate the impact of shifting the commission liability from tenants to landlords, which is central to the New York rental market reform. As the equilibrium rent increase cannot fully compensate the commission cost on landlords, the policy decreases rental supply and makes searching tenants worse off. I characterize the optimal allocation of the broker’s fee and show that brokers with greater listing capacity should list more rentals with the fee paid by landlords.

09

Dmitry Sedov (Northwestern)

题目：How Efficient are Firm Location Configurations? Empirical Evidence from the Food Service Industry

摘要：Leveraging detailed data on roughly 400,000 US urban restaurants, I study the welfare losses due to inefficient firm location configurations in the food service industry. I first obtain restaurant locations and foot traffic from SafeGraph, collect their characteristics from Yelp and scrape local commercial real estate rental rates from major listing aggregators. Next, I estimate a structural model of consumer demand, firm entry and capacity optimization. I then develop an algorithmic approximation approach to analyzing the efficiency of firm location configurations and explore the welfare gains available through the spatial reconfiguration of firms. In the median market, reconfiguration can lead to an 8.51% increase in total industry profits with a simultaneous 7.73% improvement in the consumer welfare metric. I find suggestive evidence that firms' incentives to spatially differentiate play an important role in shaping inefficient location configurations.

10

Eduardo Fraga (Yale)

题目：Drivers of Concentration: The Roles of Trade Access, Structural Transformation, and Local Fundamentals

摘要：What factors determine the degree of spatial concentration of a country's population? I investigate the drivers of concentration by adding non-homothetic preferences to a modern quantitative spatial model, obtaining a two-sector spatial model in which concentration depends on trade networks, structural transformation, and location-specific fundamentals (i.e. productivities and amenities). The model delivers an analytical expression decomposing changes in spatial concentration into separate terms that reflect the roles of these three forces. I then bring the model to the data in two steps: first, estimate gravity trade equations to recover year- and sector-specific trade-cost matrices; then, I calibrate the model to the 2005 global economy (featuring 1611 locations across 192 countries) by finding local fundamentals that rationalize population and income data given the equilibrium equations. I use this calibrated model for counterfactual exercises that clarify the role of trade access on spatial concentration. Results indicate that increasing access to foreign markets reduces concentration in most countries. Finally, I use the model-implied decomposition equation to disentangle the roles of structural transformation, differential trade access, and local fundamentals in accounting for the observed 1990-2015 changes in concentration for 44 countries. The bulk of the variation is explained by local fundamentals, with only 1% accounted for by differential trade access and structural transformation.

11

Eunjee Kwon (USC)

题目：Why Do Improvements in Transportation Infrastructure Reduce the Gender Gap in South Korea?

摘要：This study investigates whether the expansion of high-speed rail (HSR) helps reduce thegender gap in labor market outcomes —a question for which there is limited prior evidence.With its high level of gender disparity, South Korea provides an ideal setting to study this issuethanks to its extensive geocoded micro-panel datasets and a massive expansion of HSR beginningin 2004. Using an instrumental variable strategy that leverages historical railroads constructedin Korea during the Japanese colonial era, I demonstrate empirically that the gender gap in the South Korean labor market decreased with the expansion of high-speed rail (HSR). Specifically,the gender gap in employment (wages) fell by 20% (16%) in core areas (Seoul metropolitan) and16% (0%) in non-core areas (outside of the Seoul metropolitan). To understand the mechanismsat play, I employ a spatial general equilibrium model to structurally decompose HSR’s impactinto labor demand and supply channels. The quantitative decomposition shows that overall, HSR increased labor demand for female-intensive jobs and decreased women’s labor participationcosts. Finally, the empirical evidence of the structural estimation is provided that labor demandfor local service industries where women are hired more intensively increased most with HSR.In addition, in non-core areas, women’s participation in the labor force was encouraged byimprovement in local amenities, particularly in the areas of education and childcare, whichreduced women’s childcare burdens.

12

Ewane Theophile (UQAM) 

题目：Trade costs, prices and connectivity in Rwanda 

摘要：We combine high-frequency market price data and the road network to estimate the size of internal trade costs in Rwanda and evaluate whether better connectivity reduces these costs. We find that internal trade costs in Rwanda, defined as a function of distance are ten times higher than in the u .s ., three times higher than in Ethiopia, and two times higher than in Nigeria. Holding Rwanda pass-through rate at the u .s ., Ethiopian, and Nigeria levels would have reduced the size of internal trade costs by half. We also find that these costs are particularly high for manufactured products. We test two mechanisms related to the intensity of competition, and the accessibility to road infrastructure. We show that intermediaries are charging higher markups in locations where there is less competition. We also show that better road connectivity through access to feeder and national roads matter as connecting a location to a feeder road reduces trade costs by approximately two cents per mile.

13

Ezequiel Garcia-Lembergman (Berkeley)

题目：Multi-establishment Firms, Pricing and the Propagation of Local Shocks: Evidence from US Retail

摘要：I study whether and how retail chains and their geographic distribution of stores contribute to the propagation of shocks across regions in the United States. Linking detailed store scanner micro-data to a county-level house price dataset for the period of the Great Recession, I investigate the spread of house-price induced local shocks through the networks of retail chains. My main empirical finding is that county-level prices are sensitive to shocks in distant counties that happen to be served by the same retail chains. A 10% drop in house prices in other counties that are served by the same retailers leads, on average, to a 1.4% decline in the local consumer retail price index. My results hold after conditioning on trade relationships due to geographic proximity. In fact, I document that once the retail chains' networks are controlled for, there is no additional role for propagation of shocks across nearby regions. Finally, while the network of retail chains is an important determinant of the effect local shocks have on consumer prices, it does not affect wages in distant regions, which suggests that the network of retail chains affects consumers' real income. I rationalize the reduced-form estimates in a model in which retail chains vary prices uniformly across their stores as a function of changes in market demand that they face at the (aggregate) chain level. I find that the calibrated model with uniform pricing can fully account for the reduced-form effects. Counterfactual analysis shows that uniform pricing and the geographic distribution of retail chains reduced cross-county dispersion in inflation by 40% during the Great Recession, benefiting consumers from low-income counties that were less exposed to drops in local house prices.

14

Franklin Qian (Stanford)

题目：The Effects of High-skilled Firm Entry on Incumbent Residents

摘要：Using 391 high-skilled firm entries in the U.S. from 1990–2010, we estimate the effects of the firm entry on incumbent residents’ consumption, finances, and mobility. We compare outcomes for residents living close to the entry location with those living far away while controlling for their proximity to potential high-skilled firm entry sites. We find high-skilled incumbents, especially homeowners, benefit. Low-skilled incumbents on average benefit less. For a representative firm entry with 1000 new employees entering a metropolitan area with a population of 1.1 million, the aggregate welfare benefit across all incumbents is an annual equivalent of $25 million. Lowskilled renters living within 10 minutes from the entry bear the largest costs.

15

Gregor Schubert (HBS)

题目：House Price Contagion and U.S. City Migration Networks

摘要：Why do national trends in house prices spread more to some cities than to others? This paper proposes an explanation of house price contagion based on migration spillovers between U.S. cities: Increases in house prices as a result of local economic shocks and housing supply constraints drive out-migration to other cities. These migration flows are more likely to affect cities with stronger pre-existing migration links to the origin cities, and increase house prices at these destinations. I use the network structure of inter-city migration to develop an instrument for identifying causal spillover effects between cities: An increase in other cities' house prices by 10% in the long run causes a 6.3% house price move in a city exposed to the shock through migration links. I show that migration spillovers from the effect of interest rate declines on house prices in other cities can explain 32% of the cross-sectional variation in house price growth during the run-up to the housing boom of the 2000s. To quantify the effect of changes in migration costs and housing supply constraints on these house price spillovers, I develop and estimate a dynamic spatial equilibrium model that incorporates forward-looking migration choices. After estimating this model with U.S. data, I show that lower migration costs substantially reduce the dispersion in house price growth: without worker mobility, the spread in house price growth across cities in response to wage shocks would be 65-70% larger. Moreover, declines in worker mobility increase the impact of housing policy on the distribution of house price growth across cities.

16

Ian Herzog (Toronto)

题目：The City-Wide Effects of Tolling Downtown Drivers: Evidence from London’s Congestion Charge

摘要：I study the eects of London England's Congestion Charge on regional traffic, commuting, and economic activity's spatial distribution. In 2003, London began tolling drivers to enter its central business district on workdays and this policy immediately reduced downtown traffic. I measure exposure to tolled trac throughout London's regional road network and show that the policy also reduced rush-hour traffic on radialroads leading downtown. I then use London's Congestion Charge as a natural experiment to identify ensuing effects on commuting by car and public transit and find that traffic decreases both the number of commuters and their driving rates at the margin. In a quantitative spatial model, the effect on the number of commuters suggests that endogenous location choices inuence the congestion charge's equilibrium effects and I use a model with endogenous traffic externalities and mode choice for policy analysis. Simulations suggest that London's Congestion Charge increases driving rates among untolled commuters and gives the region's commuters positive net benets that disproportionately accrue to low-skill workers.

17

Jacob Krimmel (Wharton)

题目：Reclaiming Local Control: School Finance Reforms and Housing Supply Restrictions

摘要：Local policies preventing new home construction have severe negative spillover effects on housing affordability, geographic mobility, and macroeconomic growth. This paper examines the loss of local control over public good financing as a new causal channel behind the rise of such housing supply restrictions. Local governments rely on both fiscal and land use policy to provide quality public goods. I develop a model showing losing autonomy over property taxation creates incentives to limit new development, as localities can neither self-finance nor price public goods. I then exploit California's mid-1970s landmark school finance equalization, which prevented jurisdictions from setting their desired level of education spending, as a natural experiment for this loss of control. Using linked historical data on school district finances, housing, and municipal land use policies, I show in a difference-in-differences framework that school districts with larger exclusionary motives--those that benefited most from local control of education funding--enacted more stringent land use controls and built less housing after the reforms. I find suggestive evidence of the exclusionary effects of supply restrictions. House prices increased and minority population share decreased in wealthy school districts constrained by the equalization. These findings have implications for the unintended effects of fiscal federalism on the housing market, namely that fiscal policy affects new development in the short run and the urban form in the long run.

18

Jan David Bakker (UCL) 

题目：Trade and Agglomeration: Theory and Evidence from France

摘要：Trade openness leads to aggregate welfare gains, but the local effects of trade vary across space. This paper shows that the welfare gains from trade are lower in smaller cities, due to weaker export-specific agglomeration. Using rich micro data from France, I show that firms’ export-to-sales ratio increases with city size, both within and across industries. I develop an open economy economic geography model with heterogeneous firms to rationalize these novel facts: firms jointly choose their location and export behavior in the presence of sectoral differences in factor intensity and external economies of scale in export costs. Within industries, more productive firms sort into larger cities and into exporting, endogenously benefitting from lower export costs. Across industries, more capital-intensive sectors are endogenously more export intensive and overrepresented in larger cities. To quantify the role of export-specific agglomeration forces, I structurally estimate the model: they account for 1/3 of the differences in export intensity across locations. As a result, counterfactual trade liberalization induces 17% lower welfare gains in bottom size vs top size-quartile locations. These results shed new light on the distributional effects of trade openness and help explain the urban-rural divide over protectionist policies.

19

Joanna Venator (Wisconsin)

题目：Dual Earner Migration, Earnings, and Unemployment Insurance

摘要：Dual-earner couples’ decisions of where to live and work often result in one spouse — the trailing spouse — experiencing earnings losses at the time of a move. This paper examines how married couples’ migration decisions differentially impact men’s and women’s earnings and the role that policy can play in improving post-move outcomes for trailing spouses. I use panel data from the NLSY97 and a generalized difference-in-differences design to show that access to unemployment insurance (UI) for trailing spouses increases long-distance migration rates by 1.9-2.3 percentage points (38-46%) for married couples. I find that women are the primary beneficiaries of this policy, with higher UI uptake following a move and higher annual earnings of $4,500-$12,000 three years post-move. I then build and estimate a structural model of dual-earner couples’ migration decisions to evaluate the effects of a series of counterfactual policies. I show that increasing the likelihood of joint distant offers substantively increase migration rates, increases women’s post-move employment rates, and improves both men and women’s earnings growth at the time of a move. However, unconditional subsidies for migration that are not linked to having an offer in hand at the time of the move reduce post-move earnings for both men and women, with stronger effects for women.

20

John Pedersen (Binghamton)

题目：Voting for Transit: The Labor Impact of Public Transportation Improvements 

摘要：Does better access to public transportation improve workers' ability to access quality jobs? I study the labor market impact of public transportation investment in the United States using a regression discontinuity design. In certain locales, public transit investments are, in part, assigned following local ballot measures on tax and spending proposals. I use ballots that narrowly passed or failed to identify the effects of transit spending. As expected, passage increases operational expenditure and ridership. If increased transit provision reduces labor market frictions, we could expect to see increased job-to-job flows and hiring rates. However, I find precise zero effects on job-to-job flows, and increases in funding do not result in a significant impact on hiring rates for workers overall, for high school graduates, or for college graduates. Employment increases in metropolitan areas that pass these measures, but this appears to be due to modest increases in population.

21

Jonathan Moreno-Medina (Duke) 

题目：Local Crime News Bias: Extent, Causes and Consequences

摘要：How do local news outlets cover crime, and what are the effects of said coverage on housing markets? By linking almost the universe of individual homicides to individual stories in the news, this paper estimates the bias in coverage of crime news by local TV outlets in the United States. The data show that there are substantial biases in the coverage of homicides along race (victim and suspect) and wealth: inter-racial crime is substantially over-covered; white-on-white crime is under-covered; and richer neighborhoods get substantially more coverage. I find that race bias depends on the market demographics, and that within-market variation of bias is a function of the number of stations and market size. I propose a simple model of horizontal differentiation that captures these same results, suggesting that stations are catering to the largest demographic group. Lastly, I evaluate the impact of crime coverage on housing prices using an instrumental variable strategy based on sporting events, which crowd out crime news. The results suggest robust and substantial effects of crime coverage on prices. For those murders close to a transacted house, having at least one being covered in the news reduced housing prices between 2 and 7%.

22

Kate Pennington (Berkeley ARE) (UEA Best Student Paper)

题目：Does Building New Housing Cause Displacement? The Supply and Demand Effects of Construction in San Francisco  

摘要：San Francisco is gentrifying rapidly as an influx of high-income newcomers drives up housing prices and displaces lower-income longtime residents. In theory, increasing the supply of housing should mitigate increases in rents. However, new construction could also increase demand for nearby housing by improving neighborhood quality. The net impact on nearby rents depends on the relative sizes of these supply and demand effects. This paper identifies the causal impact of new construction on nearby rents, displacement, and gentrification by exploiting random variation in the location of new construction induced by serious building fires. I combine parcel-level data on new construction with an original dataset of historic Craigslist rents and panel data on individual migration history to test the impact of proximity to new construction. I find that rents fall by 2% for parcels within 100m of new construction. Renters' risk of being displaced to a lower-income neighborhood falls by 17%. Both effects decay linearly to zero within 1.5km. Next, I show evidence of a hyperlocal demand effect, with building renovations and business turnover spiking and then returning to zero after 100m. I find that gentrification follows the pattern of this demand effect: parcels within 100m of new construction are 2.5 percentage points (29.5%) more likely to experience a net increase in richer residents. Affordable housing and endogenous construction do not affect displacement or gentrification. These findings suggest that increasing the supply of market rate housing has beneficial spillover effects for incumbent residents, reducing rents and displacement pressures while improving neighborhood quality.

23

Kenneth Tester (Kentucky)

题目：The Effect of Taxes on Where Superstars Work

摘要：Prior studies show that taxes matter for the residential locations of high-income earners. But, states raise a significant share of revenue from nonresidents, especially superstars. Using superstar athletes and variation in state tax rates, we provide causal evidence on the effect of the net-of-participation tax rate on the location of labor supply. State taxes induce high-income earners to shift employment contracts to low-tax states. The elasticity of working in a state is 0.32, and consistent with superstar phenomenon, increases with earnings. Our results suggest a novel margin of mobility responses for top-earners: the spatial relocation of labor supply by nonresidents.

24

Magdalena Domínguez (Barcelona)

题目：Sweeping Up Gangs: The Effects of Tough-on-crime Policies from a Network Approach

摘要：Worldwide, gang proliferation is fought mostly with tough punishment strategies such as sweeps. In this paper, I study their causal effect on crime for arrested individuals and known peers following a difference-in-differences strategy. I also take advantage of the network structure I retrieved to assess peer effects and identify key players. I perform such an analysis with novel administrative data from the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, where Latin gangs expanded rapidly and where a stark policy change occurred. Results show significant reductions in crimes of arrested individuals and their peers, particularly in crimes against the person. The areas of the sweeps benefit from reductions in crime and improvements in health and education. I further conduct an innovative counterfactual policy exercise that compares sweep outcomes with theoretically predicted crime reductions when removing key players. This exercise indicates that sweeps could have achieved a 50% larger reduction in criminal activity had key players been removed. In this way, a network analysis provides insights on how to improve policy design.

25

Marcos Ribeiro Frazao (Yale) 

题目：Brand Contagion: The Popularity of New Products in the United States

摘要：Distance affects the cost of moving goods and people across space. Traditional spatial economics models explore this relationship, but recent evidence suggests that geography also affects the flow of information. To investigate this hypothesis, I study the causes of brand sales growth over time and space. I analyze data from a large set of branded retail products sold in different regions in the United States and document a series of stylized facts about their life-cycle. I find that brands typically sell to a small number of locations that tend to be geographically close, and growth usually happens around previously successful markets. Furthermore, I decompose sales into three components: customer base, prices, and quantities per customer. Almost all of the variation in brand sales, both across locations and over time, comes from the first term. The evidence suggests that geography plays a vital role in customer acquisition, but not due to differences in prices. Motivated by these findings, I propose a model in which information about brands' existence spreads geographically, similarly to how contagious diseases spread. Consumers aware of a brand might 'infect' others with that knowledge, and the probability of contagion depends on their location. Additionally, brands have different costs to deliver their goods to different markets. I use the predictions for the correlation of brand sales and customer base across regions to estimate the model using Simulated Methods of Moments and find that information frictions are more severe between distant locations. Furthermore, eliminating the role of distance in contagion increases consumer welfare by 32.5%. These results highlight the importance of geography for the spread of information about brands. This relationship allows for the description of brand dynamics across space and has significant welfare implications.

26

Margaret Bock (WVU)

题目：Unintended Consequences of the Appalachian Development Highway System on Mortality

摘要：A growing literature aims to uncover the causal link between highways and economic activity. However, specific attention to federally funded rural roads and highways is sparse given implicit endogeneity concerns about road placement decisions for the sake of rural development and market exposure. This study examines the impact of the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS), one of the largest and most expensive federal infrastructure projects in the United States, on mortality outcomes in the region. Instrumental variable (IV) results suggest ADHS construction significantly reduced travel-time-sensitive mortality rates, such as heart disease and hypertension, in earlier decades of the sample. IV results also suggest the ADHS may be associated with increased mortality rates, notably accidents, in later decades of the sample. The additional cost caused by the ADHS in terms of mortality is estimated to be $24.2 billion dollars over the length of the sample. However, benefits such as improved travel times, employment, and income increases outweigh these costs.

27

Mariya Shappo (Illinois)

题目：The Long-Term Impact of Oil and Gas Extraction: Evidence from the Housing Market

摘要：Pennsylvania has a long history of oil and gas extraction. When the production period ends, many wells are left behind and some remain unplugged. Unplugged wells impose serious environmental costs, including explosion hazard and risk of water, atmosphere, and soil contamination. This paper quantifies these costs by estimating the effect of unplugged wells on housing prices. I use rich data on oil and gas drilling, housing market transactions, and lease agreements to conduct difference-in-differences and instrumental variable analyses. I show that well abandonment reduces house prices. Old wells, left behind by oil and gas operators, affect house prices more than active, producing ones. However, this depreciation is reversible: if well site clean-up is completed, house prices recover almost entirely. I show that the benefits of proper well plugging are larger than the costs. This motivates environmental policies aimed at creating incentives for oil and gas producers to plug wells. These policies may include higher bankruptcy insurance requirements or environmental taxes.

28

Matthew Gross (Michigan)  

题目：The Long-Term Impacts of Rent Control on Renters

摘要：Rent control is a common policy tool enacted to limit the growth of rents and allow tenants to remain in their homes for longer. Prior empirical research has mainly focused on rent control’s impact on neighborhoods and housing markets while ignoring the potential long-term impacts of rent control for the people directly affected by the policy, particularly children. Using a nearest neighbor Mahalanobis distance matching strategy and publicly available outcome data at the census tract level, I report estimated treatment effects of rent control on average long-term outcomes for children. Consistent with the literature, I first provide evidence that rent control leads to increases in the average housing tenure duration. I also show evidence implying that rent control improves economic mobility for those who receive it while also creating negative spillover effects for those that do not but live in cities with rent control policies. In tracts with a high proportion of rental units, rent control is associated with a $1,300 increase in average tract-level income. Lastly, I report suggestive evidence that rent control has small long-term benefits for children at the bottom of the parent income distribution, but further study is required to validate these results.

29

Meng Li (Queen’s)

题目：Within-city Income Inequality, Residential Sorting, and House Prices

摘要：This paper studies the impacts of rising income inequality on residential choices and house prices within a city. I develop a monocentric city model with continuous income distribution and endogenous housing supply. The household simultaneously chooses a location and housing quality within the city. The key feature of the model is that the net costs of living further from the city center consist of a common component, and a component that is increasing with income. The model can generate imperfect sorting equilibria where households at both ends of the income distribution tend to locate closer to the city center. Substantial top income growth causes central locations to become gentrified: high-quality, expensive houses are built near the city center; many of the earlier poor residents move to more affordable non-central locations. The greenbelt causes city-wide increase in housing costs and reduces welfare when the income growth for the rich is substantial, and the welfare loss is most significant for low-income households.

30

Miguel Zerecero (TSE)

题目：The Birthplace Premium

摘要：Why do people stay in economically distressed areas? In this paper, I explore a simple, yet overlooked hypothesis: people like to live close to what they call home. Using administrative data for France, I find: (i) the share of migrants who return to their birthplace is almost twice as large as the share of migrants who go to any other particular location; (ii) there is a negative relationship between labor flows and distance from the workers’ birthplace; and (iii) workers accept a wage discount between 9 to 11 percent to live in their home location. To understand the implications of these findings, I build a dynamic quantitative migration model into which I introduce home bias, understood as a utility cost of living away from one’s birthplace. I use the model to separately identify home bias and migration costs from the data. I find that differences in birth location lead to average welfare differences of up to 30 percent in consumption-equivalent terms, and explain 43 percent of the total dispersion in welfare. Finally, I show that a migration model without home bias overstates the migration response of agents. This underestimates the pass-through of local productivity to real wages and overestimates the efficiency costs associated with place-based policies.

31

Pablo E. Warnes (Columbia)  

题目：Transport Infrastructure Improvements, Intra-City Migration, and Spatial Sorting: Evidence from a BRT system in Buenos Aires

摘要：How do improvements in the urban transport infrastructure affect the spatial sorting of residents with different levels of income and education within a city? What are the welfare effects of improving urban transit once we take into account these patterns of spatial sorting? In this paper, I study the effects of the construction of a bus rapid transit system (BRT) on the spatial reorganization of residents within the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. To do so, I leverage an individual level panel data set of more than two million residents with which I can describe intra-city migration patterns. I first find reduced form evidence that the construction of the BRT increased the spatial segregation between high and low-skilled residents within the city. I then develop a dynamic quantitative spatial equilibrium model of a city with heterogeneous workers that allows me to quantify the welfare effects of this BRT system while taking into account these spatial sorting patterns. With this quantitative framework, I can measure the average welfare gains for residents that were living near the BRT lines before these were built. I find that welfare gains were very similar between high- and low-skilled workers living in the same locations, but very different within skill levels across locations. Residents living near a BRT line in neighborhoods with the lowest share of high-skilled residents saw welfare gains close to 1% on average, while residents living near a BRT line in neighborhoods with the highest high-skilled share saw welfare gains around 0.5% on average.

32

Pedro Tanure Veloso (Minnesota) 

题目：Housing Supply Constraints and the Distribution of Economic Activity: The Case of the Twin Cities

摘要：This paper analyzes the effects of city-level zoning reforms on the spatial distribution of economic activity in a metropolitan area. Using parcel-level property tax and zoning data, I use Minneapolis recent reform, which eliminated single-family zoning lots, to estimate productivity gains in the local housing development sector. Using the methodology, I find that median productivity in the housing development sector is expected to grow by 9 percent at the tract level in the city. I feed the estimated productivity gain into a quantitative spatial model of the Twin Cities, the metropolitan area which Minneapolis is a part of, to compute the effect of the reform on local wages, rents and commuting patterns in the metropolitan area. I find that housing becomes around twenty five percent more affordable in Minneapolis, and rents in most of the metropolitan area fall significantly as well. As a result of people moving to Minneapolis after the zoning reform, wages in other regions of the metropolitan area increase modestly.

33

Piyush Panigrahi (Berkeley) (19th GEP/CEPR Annual Postgraduate Conference, Best Paper Prize)

题目：Endogenous Spatial Production Networks: Quantitative Implications for Trade and Productivity 

摘要：In modern economies, production is organized in large-scale complex networks of firms trading intermediate inputs with each other. Larger Indian firms selling inputs to other firms tend to have more customers, tend to be used more intensively by their customers, and tend to have larger customers. Motivated by these regularities, I propose a novel empirical model of trade featuring endogenous formation of input-output linkages between spatially distant firms. The empirical model consists of (a) a theoretical framework that accommodates first order features of firm-to-firm network data, (b) a maximum likelihood framework for structural estimation that is uninhibited by the scale of data, and (c) a procedure for counterfactual analysis that speaks to the effects of micro- and macro- shocks to the spatial network economy. In the model, differences in production costs across firms arise not just from differences in productivity but also from finding the most cost-effective suppliers of intermediate inputs. Firms with low production costs end up larger because they find more customers, are used more intensively by their customers and in turn their customers lower production costs and end up larger themselves. The model is estimated using novel micro-data on firm-to-firm sales between Indian firms. The model's fit is good. The estimated model implies that a 10% decline in inter-state border frictions in India leads to welfare gains ranging between 1% and 8% across districts. Moreover, over half of the variation in changes in firms' sales to other firms can be explained by endogenous changes in the network structure.

34

Prottoy Aman Akbar (Pittsburgh) 

题目：Who Benefits from Faster Public Transit?  

摘要：Low income commuters are more likely to ride and reside near public transit within cities, but do they also benefit more from faster transit travel? Combining survey data on travel behavior with web-scraped data on counterfactual travel times for millions of trips across 49 large US cities, I estimate a structural model of travel mode and residential location choice. I characterize the heterogeneity across income groups and cities in commuters' willingness to pay for access to faster transit and the expected increase in transit ridership in response to marginal transit improvements. I find that richer transit riders sort more aggressively into the fastest transit routes and are, on average, willing to pay more for

faster commutes. Improvements in transit speed are most effective at generating transit ridership and welfare gains where transit is already fast (relative to driving), in cities with a greater share of rail-based transit and where the gains are larger for higher-income commuters. Transit improvements benefit low-income commuters more where transit is relatively slow, in cities with more bus transit, and where the overall marginal gains are small.

35

Rizki Nauli Siregar (UC Davis)  

题目：Global Prices, Trade Protection, and Internal Migration: Evidence from Indonesia 

摘要：I study how regions respond to price shocks in the presence of internal migration. I examine Indonesia in the 2000s as it faced a commodity boom for palm oil, which became one of its main export commodities. I exploit the variation in the land shares and crop suitability to compute the potential contribution of main crops across district economies as a measure of local exposure to shocks. I find that the commodity boom increased the purchasing power of palm oil-producing districts. These districts also received more migration, providing evidence that palm oil price shocks were no longer localized. Indeed, internal migration spread the windfall. I also find spillover to neighboring districts. However, these relatively higher levels of purchasing power did not last after the commodity boom ended in 2014. I show that the palm-oil sector grew through extensification as a response to the price shocks, with no indication of growth through intensification. I estimate the overall welfare gains in Indonesia between 2005 and 2010 and find substantial gains from migration.

36

Sarah Thomaz (UC Irvine)

题目：Investigating ADUS: Determinants of Location and Their Effects on Property Values

摘要：Cities across the United States are facing a housing shortage. Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) offer a unique development strategy to fill low-density residential zones. However, remarkably little is known about the topic. This paper examines ADUs in Los Angeles to discover what housing and location factors contribute to homeowners’ decision to construct an ADU. The analysis finds that larger homes on lots with higher land value – though not necessarily larger lots – tend to encourage more ADU construction. The paper then investigates the effect of an ADU on property value. An instrumental variable approach is used by exploiting a Califorinia law that removed several barriers to ADU permits. Results suggest that addition of an ADU increases the property value of a parcel by about 50%.

37

Sebastian Ellingsen (Pompeu Fabra)

题目：Free and Protected: Trade and Breaks in Long-Term Persistence  

摘要：The spatial distribution of economic activity depends largely on market access and history, but countries differ greatly in the extent to which their geographies reflect these two determinants. What explains these differences? This paper explores this question using a staggered lifting of restrictions on direct trade with Europe across the Spanish Empire. I combine a difference-in-differences approach with a dynamic spatial equilibrium framework and detailed georeferenced data on maritime travel from historical logbooks to examine this issue. I show that the increase in market access induced by the reform led to a substantial reconfiguration of the economic geography in places that were initially less densely settled. Moreover, I show that modern-day settlement patterns depend less on pre-colonial population density and more on coastal access in areas subjected to the reform. Taken together, the findings show that a key determinant of persistence in economic geography is the level of development of a country as it opens up to trade.

38

Sebastian Ottinger (UCLA Anderson)  

题目：Immigrants, Industries and Path Dependence

摘要：How did locations develop their specializations in specific manufacturing industries? I show that European immigration to the United States affected the initial location of industries in the late nineteenth century, creating a spatial pattern that remained relatively stable. Immigrants’ exposure to specialized manufacturing knowledge and skills depends on their origin. The comparative advantage that came to US counties “embodied” in immigrants predicts employment in disaggregated manufacturing industries in subsequent decades. The early establishment of firms in novel industries gave locations first-mover advantage and shaped local manufacturing specialization. Agglomeration forces locked in industries until the present. I address endogeneity issues by exploiting arguably random variation in early immigration waves due to the interaction of the aggregate arrivals from European countries, and the movement of the frontier of settlement across U.S. counties.

39

Shiyu Cheng (Kentucky)

题目：High-Speed Rail Network and Brain Drain: Evidence from College Admission Scores in China

摘要：In the paper, I use the college admission cutoff scores to reveal students’ college preferences under the enrollment quota. By exploiting the quasi-experimental variation in whether or not college cities are connected by the HSR network, I document a two-point increase in the cutoff scores following a HSR station opening in the college city using difference-in-difference (DD) approach. Colleges in the megacities experience a larger increase in cutoff scores after the station opening. These findings suggest that the HSR network stimulates “brain drain” from unconnected cities to connected cities, especially connected megacities.

40

Tianyun Zhu (Syracuse)  

题目：Estimating the Implicit Price Elasticity of the Demand for Neighborhood Amenities: A Hedonic Approach

摘要：Starting from the pioneering work by Rosen(1974), plenty of studies propose new approaches that can avoid endogeneity in the Rosen two-step procedure and recover the heterogeneous preferences from the hedonic framework. Motivated by previous studies, this paper proposes an alternative approach which yields a likelihood-based estimator for implicit price elasticity of amenity demand. An application of my approach to a cross-sectional data set of Cleveland MSA in 2000 yields price elasticity of demand for public high school quality and neighborhood ethnic composition. Based on the estimates of the implicit price elasticity, it is also possible to characterize the sorting equilibrium with respect to the amenity of interest and measure the change in willingness to pay due to a counterfactual change in the amenity level. I also implement the procedure proposed by Bishop and Timmins(2019) and compare the results.

41

Tillman Hönig (LSE) 

题目：The Legacy of Conflict: Aggregate Evidence from Sierra Leone

摘要：This paper studies the general equilibrium impact of civil war in Sierra Leone. I first use an instrumental variable (IV) strategy and geographic conflict variation to estimate reduced-form effects. I show that civil war leads to affected areas having a higher share of workers in agriculture, fewer educated workers and lower worker income. In order to explicitly take into account general equilibrium effects such as selective migration in response to the war, I then develop an economic geography model. The model sheds light on different mechanisms through which conflict affects aggregate income: Changes in education, firm productivity and individual productivity have both direct effects on income and indirect effects by changing the allocation of labor across sectors and locations. Changes in amenities also affect the spatial allocation of labor. Next, while education outcomes are observed, I structurally estimate all unobserved parameters. In particular, I leverage the structure of the model along with observed income information and migration flows to identify firm productivities, amenities and average individual productivities. Finally, I use the model to perform counterfactual simulations. Aggregate income in Sierra Leone is estimated to be 32% lower today as a result of the civil war. Importantly, firm productivity losses can explain most of the decrease while human capital reductions alone can only account for a small part of the effect. Selective migration in response to the war also seems to play an important role and implies that local reduced-form effects are misleading when trying to estimate aggregate effects.

42

Timur Abbiasov (Columbia)

题目：Do Urban Parks Promote Racial Diversity in Social Interactions? Evidence from New York City

摘要：In this paper, I provide the first causal evidence to suggest that the provision of urban parks allows the city to promote opportunities for racially and ethnically diverse encounters. Utilizing a novel dataset featuring individual GPS tracking data for more than 60 thousand Twitter users in the New York metro area, I introduce a measure of racial diversity that captures one’s level of exposure to diverse others in places visited daily. My empirical strategy relies on using the variation in the timing of park construction works across the city (which temporarily limit the capacity of said parks) to identify the impact of the effectively accessible parkland area on the individual exposure to racial diversity. My results show that for White and Black/African American residents additional 10 acres of parks within a 5 km radius from home increase individual chances of encounters with the members of other groups by 1 p.p. The effect is sizable: for reference, transitioning from the current state to the random mixing scenario would require a 9 p.p increase in diversity for an average Black or African American individual and a 3.5 p.p increase for an average White person. I also provide evidence to suggest that park accessibility affects the diversity of White and Black residents differently: for parks located closer to home, the effect appears to be more pronounced for Whites than Blacks.

43

Xiao Betty Wang (Wharton)

题目：Housing Market Segmentation

摘要：This paper documents and explains segmentation patterns of house price dynamics within local housing markets. With housing transaction data on 188 U.S. cities from 2000 to 2015, this paper is the first to characterize within-city heterogeneity that sub-market price segments consistently grow differently from each other. I introduce a new concept of local price rank segmentation (LRS) and develop an assignment model with endogenous housing supply to explain that relative local ranks affect house prices, in addition to demand and supply. The market clearing process in the assignment model operates in a vertically ranked order and matches the joint distributions of households and houses, generating a mismatch in segments that get demand shock but not a supply response. The mismatch causes general equilibrium spillovers to prices in other segments. Housing developers have the incentive to always skew new supply to the top priced segments of the market and this skewness exacerbates the mismatch. I define the spillover on prices as price premium and structurally estimate the premium to show that it drives house price segmentation. In middle-priced segments, an estimated 10% is paid out as price premium. These findings provide new insights on segmentation in local housing markets, and help us understand how targeted housing policies (e.g. low income housing subsidies) could have spillover effects on other segments within the same local market.

44

Yiming He (Stanford)

题目：The Economic Impacts of Slum Demolition on the Displaced: Evidence from Victorian England

摘要：I study the effects of slum clearance on displaced residents in Victorian England. Between 1875 and 1910, local governments in England approved more than 80 slum clearance schemes, and they mainly targeted areas with high infectious-disease mortality and houses of poor building quality. While the explicit goal was to improve public health of the neighborhood, the potential negative economic impact on the displaced is large, as they did not voluntarily relocate. I exploit the fact that some houses were demolished for plausibly exogenous reasons, and I compare post-demolition outcomes on residential location, occupation, and intergenerational mobility between male household heads and sons who lived in these demolished houses and those living in non-demolished houses on the same street. I find that after demolition displaced residents were 7.4 percentage points more likely to move out of their neighborhood to other parts of the city. They moved to narrower streets. The displacement effect is larger for streets located in neighborhoods with more constrained housing availability. Displaced residents were 7.8 percentage points more likely to change their occupation in the medium-run. This occupation change is related to the loss of self-owned businesses and local job opportunities. I do not find evidence that displacement affected job quality, sons’ schooling, and their intergenerational mobility in the long-run.

45

Zibin Huang (Rochester)

题目：Peer Effects, Parental Migration and Children’s Human Capital: A Spatial Equilibrium Analysis in China

摘要：In China, migrant children are disadvantaged and sometimes cannot enroll in public schools in migration destinations due to some policy restrictions. Some migrant workers have to leave their children behind in their hometowns, which causes the left-behind children problem. In this study, I first identify the peer effects of migrant children and left-behind children on their classmates using classroom random assignment. I then analyze the human capital consequences of the enrollment restriction on migrant students within a spatial equilibrium model. My results show that there are negative spillovers from migrant and left-behind students. The negative effect is generally larger from left-behind students, but both shrink over time. In the counterfactual analysis, I find that if the enrollment restriction on migrant children is relaxed, migration of parents and children will increase, and the average human capital in the society will also increase. Low-skill families from small cities benefit most. This policy increases human capital through two channels. First, it directly increases enrollment in good public schools and alleviates the left-behind children problem. Second, it attracts more parents to take their left-behind children to migrate with them and indirectly reduces the total spillovers. This is the first formal quantitative analysis of public school enrollment policy in China.