Kristof Dascher

Are politics and geography related?: Evidence from a cross-section of capital cities *

With a few prominent exceptions, a capital city is typically alsothe biggest city of its country. This might suggest that a capitalcity is more attractive than other cities because of thecapital city function. In the paper, we test this hypothesis bylooking at employment growth in a sample of capital cities.Employment growth might indicate outmigration from the politicalhinterland and immigration into the capital city. Specifically, welook at a sample of regional capitals that consists of West-Germancounty seats. These county seats underwent reform in the latesixties and early seventies. In this sample, we can rejectthe idea that the county capital role does not have apositive influence on local employment growth.

Capital Cities: When Do They Stop Growing?

Abstract. This article is an attempt to explain a capital citys size. We assume away explanations such as exploitation of the capital citys hinterland. Instead, we emphasise the role of the localisation of government activity (i.e., administration or legislation) in the capital city for both the capital city economy and the hinterland economy. We assume in the model that larger regions benefit from agglomeration economies. We discuss the interaction of those agglomeration economies with an agglomeration diseconomy specific to the capital city. Under certain conditions, a stable population distribution between the capital city and its hinterland emerges where neither region captures the entire population. We also analyse the comparative statics properties of this stable equilibrium.

Beggar Thy Neighbour

Abstract A large literature emphasizes the virtues of home ownership. This article illustrates that homeowners’ influence need not always be benign. Taking a first look at large vacant housing in East Germany, the article in part attributes vacant housing and its demolition to homeowners’ interest in keeping real estate prices up.

City Silhouette, World Climate

A countrys urban silhouettes prophesy its future climate policy, or so this paper argues. The more its city silhouettes are skewed to the periphery, the more likely a country is to implement the carbon tax. This is why the effect of a countrys urban form on greenhouse gas emissions -- a bone of contention in the recent literature -- cannot be separated from that countrys choice of carbon tax. From this papers perspective, a country with greater city silhouette skews may emit less greenhouse gases not so much because its cities are more compact but because it places a higher price on carbon consumption.

A City Shape Explanation of Why Donald Trump Won

The paper introduces urban centrists (who embrace carbon taxes) and urban decentrists (who reject them). Its theoretical analysis solves linear programs that help estimate (unobservable) centrists and decentrists. Its empirical analysis computes these estimates for U.S. metro areas and applies them to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This analysis suggests that Donald Trumps shift away from the traditional bipartisan consensus on global warming - wittingly or not - has gained him nearly 280,000 votes he else would not have enjoyed (in cities where decentrists were strong). U.S. city shapes have contributed to why Donald Trump won. If decentrists continue to gain in importance (not unlikely, given ongoing decentralization and suburbanization), we should expect the rift over global warming to play an even greater role in future elections.

Federal Coordination of Local Housing Demolition in the Presence of Filtering and Migration

Vacant housing and even housing demolition have recently become an issue in a number of countries. Given this renewed interest in demolition, this paper contributes to the literature on (i) housing demolition and (ii) policy coordination. The paper extends Sweeney’s (Econometrica 42:147–167, 1974a) analysis of demolition and filtering, by letting households also choose their location. Then when demolishing part of its housing stock, a city effectively evicts some of its residents not just out of the housing quality it demolishes but out of every other of its qualities, too. The paper shows that demolition’s coordination strengthens local governments’ incentive to demolish part of their stock, by shutting down inter city migration within qualities.—A case study on Germany’s East illustrates the effects of coordinated, simultaneous every-city demolition.

Spatial Variation in Incentives to Work and Hysteresis in Welfare

This paper suggests a novel explanation of the steady rise in Germanys welfare recipient numbers. In the papers model, there are disadvantaged households employed in a city with few amenities (a bad-amenity city) who would prefer to receive welfare in a city with many amenities (a good-amenity city). They can be kept out by the good-amenity citys local government but only until a recession sets in. Then they do move from employment in the bad-amenity city into welfare in the good-amenity city. Hysteresis in welfare results.