Urban Economic Analysis on Tokyo Monopolar System

本研究的重点是通过计量城市群所带来的经济效益和成本来明确城市群的经济作用。在生产方面，城市群提高了企业的生产率。然而，在消费方面，既存在集聚经济，也存在不经济。前者称为品种经济，源于这样一个事实，即消费者可以从各种不同的商品、服务和工作类型中进行选择。后者是拥堵，如住房不足和长途通勤。我们利用日本城市数据进行了定量分析，发现集聚经济在生产和消费两个方面都对集聚不经济起主导作用。我们还发现，生产端的集聚经济推高了名义工资，而消费端的集聚经济推低了实际工资。人们通常认为，东京单极系统对家庭不利。然而，我们的结果表明，这是积极的，因为品种的经济提高了家庭的使用水平。我们使用各种便利设施和环境变量来控制城市环境的影响。作为副产品，我们拥有基于城市的便利设施和环境变量数据，这将有助于我们未来对城市经济学的研究。

The focus of this research is to clarify the economic roles of urban agglomeration by econometrically measuring economic benefits and costs due to urban agglomeration. In the production side, urban agglomeration enhances the productivity of firms. In the consumption side, however, both agglomeration economies and diseconomies exist. The former, called economies of varieties, are derived from the fact that consumers can choose from a variety of differentiated goods, services, and job types. The latter are congestion such as insufficient housing and long distance commuting. We conducted quantitative analysis by using Japanese city-based data to see whether the former dominate the latter or not.We found that the agglomeration economies dominate the agglomeration diseconomies both in production and in consumption. We also found that the agglomeration economies in production side push up the nominal wages while the agglomeration economies in consumption side push down the real wages. It is often considered that the Tokyo Monopolar System is negative for households. However, our results show that it is positive because the economies of varieties increase the utility level of households.We used various kinds of amenities and environmental variables so as to control the impacts of urban environments. As byproducts, we had city-based data of amenities and environmental variables, which would help our future research on urban economics.