Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Spatial Equilibrium and the Value of Public Transit

摘要城市化世界的一个重要问题是了解公共交通如何影响地区的增长和发展。公共基础设施投资成本高昂，因此，鉴于成本高昂，必须了解其对区域发展的贡献，以评估收益。由于公共交通不是在空间上随机分布的，因此将社区的舒适性价值与交通网络本身的舒适性价值分开是具有挑战性的。这项研究考虑了由于飓风而导致的主要交通网络的意外关闭，并利用详细的数据集检查了这种关闭如何影响企业、社区和通勤者。这项提案将突出推动公共交通和社区动态之间复杂关系的经济力量。因此，这项研究将为政策制定者提供信息，说明基础设施项目可能以何种方式获得资金，以及这些决定如何影响社区的发展。找到可信的证据，证明通勤者对公共交通的重视在城市化世界中具有首要重要性。这项提议利用了一种外生冲击，即大城市的一条主要交通线路因飓风而意外关闭一段较长时间。这一关闭预计将对受影响社区的数十万通勤者和数千家企业造成重大干扰。该项目利用这一巨大的信息冲击，将城市网络的空间平衡分解为它们的组成部分。为了做到这一点，该项目将构建一个新的数据集，其中包括住宅历史、详细的住房特征和租金历史。该项目将探索城市和社区的性质以及消费者在选择住房时的个人选择如何内生地改变城市景观的基本问题，包括政策制定者应该为交通提供多少资金，以及以什么方式提供资金。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

AbstractOne of the important issues in an urbanizing world is understanding how public transportation affects the growth and development of regions. Public infrastructure investments are costly and thus understanding their contribution to regional development is imperative to assess the benefits given the high costs. Since public transportation is not randomly distributed across space, it is challenging to disentangle the amenity value of neighborhoods from that of the transportation network itself. This research considers an unexpected closure of a major transit network due to a hurricane and examines how this closure affected businesses, neighborhoods and commuters by utilizing a detailed dataset. This proposal will highlight the economic forces driving the complex relationship between public transportation and neighborhood dynamics. Thus the research will inform policy makers in what ways infrastructure projects may be funded and how these decisions shape the development of neighborhoods.Finding credible evidence of the value that commuters place on proximity to public transport is of first-order importance in an urbanizing world. This proposal utilizes as an exogenous shock, the unexpected closure of a major transit line for an extended period in a large city due to a hurricane. This closure was expected to cause major disruption to hundreds of thousands of commuters and thousands of businesses in the affected neighborhoods. This project utilizes this large information shock to disentangle the spatial equilibrium of urban networks into their component parts. In order to do this, the project will construct a novel dataset of residential history, detailed housing characteristics and rental price history. The project will explore fundamental questions about the nature of cities and neighborhoods and how the individual choices of consumers when choosing housing endogenously change the urban landscape, including how much, and in what ways, policy makers should fund transportation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.