This study examines whether media exposure can drive local economic development using the case of anime “holy lands” in Japan—real-world locations depicted in animated works. Exploiting staggered anime broadcasts across municipalities from 2000 to 2020, I estimate causal effects using a difference-in-differences design and a complementary shift-share instrumental variable strategy. The results show that featured municipalities experience increases in income per taxpayer (about 1%) and night-time luminosity, with effects emerging after several years. These gains are not driven by tourism or local government spending. Instead, the results suggest that population inflows—primarily through increased in-migration—play an important role. Consistent with this interpretation, residential and commercial land prices rise, consistent with increased local attractiveness. Overall, media exposure appears to reshape local economies by influencing residential location choices, with the results suggesting an important role for spatial population redistribution.
How do we evaluate the welfare gains from transport infrastructure investment? We present a quantitative spatial framework that integrates traffic and economic responses to infrastructure improvements and derives the elasticity of aggregate welfare to changes in the transportation network. The resulting formula extends the traditional ``social savings'' method to incorporate route and mode choice, agglomeration and dispersion externalities, and traffic congestion. We apply the formula to the U.S. freight network and assess the benefits of reducing costs on each segment of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. The traditional and extended measures are closely related overall, but they differ in the level of estimated gains and in the ranking of some highly valued links. Where the rankings differ, network position determines how congestion and spatial adjustment alter a link's measured benefit. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
This study examines how air pollution affects household consumption in the digital economy. Using a proprietary dataset constructed from more than 500 million online transactions across 291 Chinese cities from 2017 to 2019, we study how online spending changes when pollution rises. To identify causal effects, we exploit quasi-exogenous variation in air quality generated by China’s winter heating policy and implement a difference-in-differences design comparing northern and southern cities around the heating period. We find that pollution increases online spending on health-related products and necessities and reduces spending on non-essential goods. The response is concentrated in the heating period itself, with little evidence of stockpiling before or delayed adjustment afterward. Item-level evidence shows that the increase in spending operates mainly through higher quantities purchased rather than higher payment per item. Additional evidence from Baidu search activity suggests that the spending response is associated with greater attention to pollution risks and protective products, as well as worse mood.
Quantitative spatial models (QSMs) offer an economically and geographically realistic framework to evaluate the effects of transportation infrastructure within cities. In this survey, I argue that QSMs are most compelling when complemented by credible research design. To do so, I review alternative economic valuation methods and develop a simple urban QSM to interpret changes accessibility. The model maps the estimands of the alternative approaches into a consistent framework, demonstrating that standard empirical research designs can be conformable with QSM estimation. This exercise reveals several shortcomings common in applications of QSMs. These shortcomings, along with model enrichments, inform the future agenda of this literature.
We construct city-level measures of freeway disamenities and examine their association with metropolitan growth. We combine neighborhood-level estimates from Brinkman and Lin (2024) with calibrated spatial models for U.S. metropolitan areas. Each city measure is based on a counterfactual that removes estimated disamenities while holding modeled travel times fixed. Cities with larger estimated disamenities grew more slowly, conditioned on total freeway mileage and initial population. Total freeway mileage is positively associated with growth in the same specification. Estimated disamenities are larger in cities with greater 1950 populations, more centralized freeway networks, and coastal geography. These patterns are consistent with local quality-of-life costs attenuating regional access-related growth benefits.
Governments often provide homeownership subsidies, but their effects may depend critically on institutional context. This paper estimates the impacts of Hong Kong’s Tenants Purchase Scheme, an unusual program that allowed 183,700 regularly income-tested public housing tenants to buy restricted ownership rights. Leveraging its incomplete roll-out between 1998 and 2006, I find that the program increased the share of “well-off” households in treated housing estates by 44 percent from 11 p.p. Further evidence suggests that incumbent households purchased units to avoid regular income tests and reconfigured co-residence among family members to obtain additional public housing units. The unintended consequence was to exacerbate hardship for excluded low-income populations.
Maritime transport remains the backbone of global trade, yet the port and shipping network that carries it has been transformed by containerization and related technological advances. Drawing on newly available granular data—digitized historical shipping records, georeferenced ship movements, and shipment-level routing information—we present five stylized facts on the structure and evolution of the maritime network. Global shipping activity is highly concentrated among a changing lineup of dominant top ports even as lower-ranked ports disperse, while state-owned Chinese port terminal operators increasingly account for these global volumes, boosting overall port operations while delivering efficiency gains mostly to Chinese vessels. We use these facts to organize a synthesis of a fast-growing literature: containerization reshaped which port cities could expand, reinforced hub-and- spoke concentration that yields large but localized welfare gains, embedded ports in multimodal networks that amplify the returns to infrastructure, and generated market power, congestion, and environmental costs. Together, this evidence shows how evolving maritime technologies simultaneously deepen global integration and heighten the economic and geopolitical importance of critical nodes in the transport network—and of who controls them.
This paper estimates how Interstate highway construction affected the adult outcomes of individuals born into rural America using longitudinally linked microdata. While aggregate cross-sectional studies find mixed effects of highways on rural economies, we reveal substantial person-based benefits that persist even when individuals migrate. By instrumenting highway construction with the 1947 federal highway plan, we identify highway impacts on persons born into rural America by comparing birth counties which happened to fall between metropolitan transportation hubs on the planned highway grid to those that did not. Using Social Security records linked to Census data for cohorts born 1935-1955, we find that highways benefited those born into rural America, increasing income by 4.4% ($1960), reducing unemployment by 3%, and raising college completion by 8%. Highways also shifted the industrial composition of rural Americans from agriculture to services and enabled strategic out-migration to urban areas and along highways. Further heterogeneity analyses by industry and migration choice show evidence that agricultural workers benefited by out-migration, while non-agricultural workers gained from improved local labor markets. Importantly, benefits accrued to both those who stayed and those who migrated out, suggesting highways improved local opportunities in addition to facilitating migration to opportunities. Comparison with cross-sectional data suggests that much of the county-level income gains reflect direct benefits to rural-born individuals. These findings demonstrate that infrastructure investments generate lasting labor market and human capital gains, which were not visible in conventional cross-sectional analyses.
The literature assessing the effects of transportation infrastructure on how people and economic activity distribute themselves across a system of cities has three main parts. The theoretical literature makes robust predictions about how transportation infrastructure affects the internal structure of cities, but for systems of cities, theory does not let us rule much out. The city-level empirical literature establishes that improved urban transportation infrastructure causes suburban migration, but has only a small impact on city population. This literature is less helpful for understanding the effects of transportation infrastructure on the way people are distributed across a system of cities, but has made some progress. The small empirical literature looking at how transportation infrastructure affects systems of cities using cross-country data remains underdeveloped and is inconclusive.
I construct novel census-tract-by-year panel data measuring Airbnb listings and eviction filings to estimate the effect of the initial entry of Airbnb into neighborhoods on local eviction filings. Using difference-in-differences and event study methodologies, I find no evidence that Airbnb entry leads to a substantial increase in eviction filings in the ensuing three years. However, this average effect may mask dynamic and heterogeneous effects across neighborhoods, as I find suggestive evidence that, after two years, Airbnb entry causes a modest increase in eviction filings in neighborhoods with a high poverty rate and/or a high concentration of renter households. In neighborhoods where poverty rates are above the national median, Airbnb entry is associated with an increase of 4.5 to 10.9 eviction filings per 1000 renter households after two years, or a 7.0% to 11.6% increase relative to the average eviction filing rate. In neighborhoods where owner-occupancy is below the national median, the increase ranges from 6.1 to 10.6, or from 8.4% to 10.5%.
Transportation infrastructure is central to the operation of cities. A look at consumer expenditure and travel data shows the welfare gains available through higher travel speeds and shorter travel times. Classical land use theory, travel demand estimation, and quantitative spatial urban models all have their places as useful frameworks for conceptualizing and estimating the impacts of transport infrastructure on urban structure and welfare. However, well identified reduced form analysis is centrally important to keep researchers honest and our work accessible to a broad audience.
This paper investigates how Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), business-led organizations financing local safety, cleanliness, and amenity improvements through mandatory commercial levies, affect residential property values in London. Using geocoded transactions from 2000 to 2019 and a staggered difference-in-differences estimator, we find that BID formation raises house prices by 5-6% within boundaries (roughly 26,000 pound per property), with positive spillovers up to 300 m. We also report that effects are stronger for better-funded BIDs. Following BID formation, neighborhoods see increased shares of one-family households and professionals, accompanied by lower unemployment rates, but reduced inflows of ethnic minority residents.
To determine whether constructing infrastructure in the United States is becoming increasingly expensive, as much recent research suggests, we need a reliable way to measure the cost of building infrastructure over time. In this paper, I outline the components of an ideal measure for such a cost. I then highlight three features—adjusting for quality changes, the inclusion of markups, and the inclusion of costs incurred by the administrative apparatus of the government—that plague measurements of cost. Expenditure-based measures have the potential to capture all costs, including those incurred in-house by the government, but suffer from difficulty in measuring a constant quality unit. Price- or cost-based measures are better at measuring a constant quality unit, but often fail to include very substantial costs borne by government in excess of funds paid to private contractors. I illustrate these issues with the example of US Interstate highways, explaining each measure’s strengths and deficiencies. I conclude by discussing where researchers can make the most valuable contributions in measuring the costs of transportation infrastructure.
We study how Italy's need-based student-aid system (Diritto allo Studio Universitario, DSU) shapes first-time entrants' choices of where and what to study by linking administrative records on first-time enrolments to university characteristics and DSU service provision. Using a Latent Class Logit model that accounts for heterogeneity in preferences, we find that dormitory capacity for eligible students substantially increases enrolment: adding 100 places raises enrolment at an average-sized institution by 5.3-9.6% (equivalent to about 19 to 34 additional students). By contrast, grants show no statistically significant effect. Dormitory availability matters most for students who lack a nearby university and those in STEM fields. Simulations focused on alternative expansions of dormitory supply suggest that a nationwide increase reallocates enrolment toward central/northern hubs and higher-quality institutions, whereas regionally targeted support in the South only marginally curbs South-to-North flows.
This paper investigates the impact of bureaucratic decentralization on allocative efficiency by leveraging China’s Province-Managing-County (PMC) reform between 2002 and 2013. We find that input and product market distortions declined significantly in reformed counties, with capital and labor reallocated towards firms with higher initial productivities. These reallocation effects appear to be driven by the enhanced incentives and informational advantages of county-level governments. Our findings highlight the potential for well-incentivized local authorities to improve allocative efficiency, offering new insights into the productivity gains from decentralization in transitional economies.
Airports are pivotal urban hubs and major clusters of economic activity, serving as critical transport nodes connecting cities to global networks. Beyond their scale and scope, airports shape the urban landscape and often stand as symbols of civic pride and local development aspiration, while simultaneously imposing substantial disamenities on populations living nearby. This paper explores the multifaceted relationship between airports, urban growth, and spatial inequalities both across and within cities, with a focus on cutting-edge research addressing the identification challenges in isolating airports’ causal effects on cities. Particular attention is devoted to underexplored economic dimensions, such as the transformative role of low-cost carriers and air tourism in driving urban development in small cities.
The number of governments in the United States has increased steadily since the 1970s, largely due to the proliferation of special districts. This growth has fueled concerns over the efficiency of public service provision, as many metropolitan areas rely on a fragmented network of jurisdictions to deliver services. However, due to a lack of exogenous variation in the number of districts, identifying the causal impact of government fragmentation is challenging. To address this challenge, this paper exploits California’s Cortese-Knox-Hertzberg Local Government Reorganization Act of 2000, which established procedures for the consolidation and annexation of cities and special districts. Using synthetic control methods, I show that the Act reduced the total number of local governments in the state by seven percent relative to its counterfactual trajectory, driven by a 15 percent decline in the number of special districts. Despite the relative decline in the number of governments, the total amount of local government spending in the state remained unchanged, suggesting that the slowing growth in jurisdictions was offset by higher spending per government. Efforts to reduce fragmentation may have limited fiscal impact unless they target districts where overlapping functions or scale inefficiencies are most pronounced.
Canonical urban models treat the labour market as frictionless and therefore imply full compensation for commuting costs. Given job search frictions, workers accept jobs that do not fully compensate for commuting costs. As a result, commuting distances become longer and affect labour market outcomes, including wages, in a way not predicted by frictionless models. Special attention is given to the role of transport-related fringe benefits, including employer-provided parking and company cars, which further increase commuting distances via tax-induced distortions.
This paper surveys recent literature estimating the causal effects of urban transport investments and urban mobility policies on housing markets. We synthesise evidence along three dimensions: the capitalisation of accessibility gains, the internalisation of transport-related externalities, and the rise of green mobility initiatives. Results indicate that while improved accessibility is generally capitalised into higher property values, negative externalities—such as noise, pollution, and congestion—can attenuate or reverse these effects. Policies such as congestion pricing, zoning reforms, and low-emission zones also influence these outcomes, highlighting how institutions, network design, and local environmental conditions shape the housing market’s response to transport investments. Recent green interventions in city centres have shown an even stronger impact on housing prices, although they can also create spillover effects in nearby neighbourhoods.
