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Working Paper
The Closing of a Major Airport: Immediate and Longer-Term Housing Market Effects
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver’s Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but no price changes at closing and little evidence of upward trending prices between announcement and closing. However, after airport closure, more higher income and fewer black households moved into these locations, and developers built higher quality houses. Finally, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock changes ...
Working Paper
Traffic Noise in Georgia: Sound Levels and Inequality
Using Lorenz-type curves, means tests, ordinary least squares, and locally weighted regressions (LWR), we examine the relative burdens of whites, blacks, and Hispanics in Georgia from road and air traffic noise. We find that whites bear less noise than either blacks or Hispanics and that blacks tend to experience more traffic noise than Hispanics. While every Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) showed that blacks experienced relatively more noise than average, such a result did not hold for Hispanics in roughly half of the MSAs. We find much heterogeneity across Census tracts using LWR. For ...
Working Paper
Monocentric city redux
This paper argues that centralized employment remains an empirically relevant stylization of midsize U.S. metros. It extends the monocentric model to explicitly include leisure as a source of utility but constrains workers to supply fixed labor hours. Doing so sharpens the marginal disutility from longer commutes. The numerical implementation calibrates traffic congestion to tightly match observed commute times in Portland, Oregon. The implied geographic distribution of CBD workers' residence tightly matches that of Portland. The implied population density, land price, and house price ...
Working Paper
Freeway Revolts!
Freeway revolts were widespread protests across the U.S. following early urban Interstate construction in the mid-1950s. We present theory and evidence from panel data on neighborhoods and travel behavior to show that diminished quality of life from freeway disamenities inspired the revolts, a?ected the allocation of freeways within cities, and changed city structure. First, actual freeway construction diverged from initial plans in the wake of the growing freeway revolts and subsequent policy responses, especially in central neighborhoods. Second, freeways caused slower growth in population, ...
Working Paper
A Quantitative Model of the Oil Tanker Market in the Arabian Gulf
Using a novel dataset, we develop a structural model of the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) market between the Arabian Gulf and the Far East. We study how fluctuations in oil tanker rates, oil exports, shipowner profits, and bunker fuel prices are determined by shocks to the supply and demand for oil tankers, to the utilization of tankers, and to bunker fuel costs. Our analysis shows that time charter rates respond only slightly to fuel cost shocks. In response to higher fuel costs, voyage profits decline, as cost shocks are only partially passed on to round-trip voyage rates. Oil exports ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Jobs and the Gender Wage Gap
Prior studies have shown that women are more willing to trade off wages for short commutes than men. Given the gender difference in commuting preferences, we show that the wage return to commuting (i.e., the wage penalty for reducing commute time) that stems from the spatial distribution of jobs contributes to the gender wage gap. We propose a simple job choice model, which predicts that differential commuting preferences would lead to a larger gender wage gap for workers who face greater wage returns to commuting based on their locations of residence and occupations. We then show empirical ...
Working Paper
The Closing of a Major Airport: Immediate and Longer-Term Housing Market Effects
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver’s Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but no price changes at closing likely because closing was widely anticipated. Further, after airport closure, high income and white households moved into these locations and developers upgraded the quality of houses being built. Finally, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock changes had substantial effects on ...
Working Paper
How Much Will the Belt and Road Initiative Reduce Trade Costs?
This paper studies the impact of transport infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative on shipment times and trade costs. Based on a new data on completed and planned Belt and Road transport projects, Geographic Information System analysis is used to estimate shipment times before and after the Belt and Road Initiative. Two sets of data are computed to address different research questions: a global database based on an analysis of 1,000 cities in 191 countries and 47 sectors and a regional database that focuses on more granular information (1,818 cities) for Belt and Road ...
Working Paper
Formative Experiences and the Price of Gasoline
An individual?s initial experiences with a common good, such as gasoline, can shape their behavior for decades. We first show that the 1979 oil crisis had a persistent neg-ative effect on the likelihood that individuals that came of driving age during this time drove to work in the year 2000 (i.e., in their mid 30s). The effect is stronger for those with lower incomes and those in cities. Combining data on many cohorts, we then show that large increases in gasoline prices between the ages of 15 and 18 sig-nificantly reduce both (i) the likelihood of driving a private automobile to work and ...
Journal Article
Shipping Prices and Import Price Inflation
During the pandemic, there have been unprecedented increases in the cost of shipping goods accompanied by delays and backlogs at the ports. At the same time, import price inflation has reached levels unseen since the early 1980s. This has led many to speculate that the two trends are linked. In this article, we use new data on the price of shipping goods between countries to analyze the extent to which increases in the price of shipping can account for the rise in U.S. import price inflation. We find that the pass-through of shipping costs is small. Nevertheless, because the rise in shipping ...