Nathaniel Baum-Snow

The effects of new public projects to expand urban rail transit

Abstract Many US cities invest in large public transit projects in order to reduce private vehicle dependence and to reverse the downward trend in public transit use. Using a unique panel data set for five major cities that upgraded their rail transit systems in the 1980s, we estimate new rail transit’s impact on usage and housing values, using distance as a proxy for transit access. New rail transit has a small impact on usage and housing values. This impact is enough to represent tangible benefits of new transit to nearby residents. New transit’s benefits are not uniformly distributed. We document which demographic groups are over represented in transit growth areas and the changes in transit usage by different demographic groups.

Roads, Railroads and Decentralization of Chinese Cities

We investigate how urban railroad and highway configurations have influenced urban form in Chinese cities since 1990. Each radial highway displaces 4% of central city population to surrounding regions, and ring roads displace about an additional 20%, with stronger effects in the richer coastal and central regions. Each radial railroad reduces central city industrial GDP by about 20%, with ring roads displacing an additional 50%. We provide evidence that radial highways decentralize service sector activity, radial railroads decentralize industrial activity, and ring roads decentralize both. Historical transportation infrastructure provides identifying variation in more recent measures of infrastructure.

Understanding the City Size Wage Gap

In this paper, we decompose city size wage premia into various components. We base these decompositions on an estimated on-the-job search model that incorporates latent ability, search frictions, firm-worker match quality, human capital accumulation and endogenous migration between large, medium and small cities. Counterfactual simulations of the model indicate that variation in returns to experience and differences in wage intercepts across location type are the most important mechanisms contributing to observed city size wage premia. Variation in returns to experience is more important for generating wage premia between large and small locations while differences in wage intercepts are more important for generating wage premia betwen medium and small locations. Sorting on unobserved ability within education group and differences in labor market search frictions and distributions of firm-worker match quality contribute little to observed city size wage premia. These conclusions hold for separate samples of high school and college graduates.

Effects of Urban Rail Transit Expansions: Evidence from Sixteen Cities, 1970-2000

FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL governments have spent more than

The effects of low income housing tax credit developments on neighborhoods

25 billion to establish or expand rail transit infrastructure in sixteen major U.S. metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2000. Billions more have been invested to maintain and improve existing rail transit lines. Despite the significant infrastructure improvements associated with these investments, transit ridership has been declining rapidly. The fraction of metropolitan area commuters in the United States using public transit declined from 0.12 in 1970 to 0.06 in 2000. Furthermore, only in a few metropolitan areas has transit increased its share of the commuting market since 1970, and in none of these areas did transit garner more than 10 percent of the market in 2000. In this paper, we evaluate the extent to which rail transit improvements have spurred new ridership and we provide some rough estimates of the value of these new commuting options. We demonstrate the importance of considering heterogeneous responses of commuting mode choice both within and between metropolitan areas to the existence of new rail lines. For example, in each metropolitan area except Chicago, commuters living beyond ten kilometers of the city center and within two kilometers of a new rail transit line increased their transit use between 1970 and 2000. However, most metropolitan areas saw declines in ridership within ten kilometers of the city center in areas near and far from new rail lines alike. Variation in metropolitan area

Inequality and City Size

This paper evaluates the impacts of new housing developments funded with the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the largest federal project based housing program in the U.S., on the neighborhoods in which they are built. A discontinuity in the formula determining the magnitude of tax credits as a function of neighborhood characteristics generates pseudo-random assignment in the number of low income housing units built in similar sets of census tracts. Tracts where projects are awarded 30 percent higher tax credits receive approximately six more low income housing units on a base of seven units per tract. These additional new low income developments cause homeowner turnover to rise, raise property values in declining areas and reduce incomes in gentrifying areas in neighborhoods near the 30th percentile of the income distribution. LIHTC units significantly crowd out nearby new rental construction in gentrifying areas but do not displace new construction in stable or declining areas.

Mismeasurement of Usual Hours Worked In the Census and ACS.

A strong positive monotonic relationship between wage inequality and city size developed between 1979 and 2007 in the United States. After accounting for differences in skill composition across cities of different sizes, we find that at least 23% of the nationwide increase in the variance of log hourly wages is explained by the more rapid growth in wage inequality in larger locations than in smaller locations. This influence occurred throughout the wage distribution, was most prevalent during the 1990s, and was mostly driven by more rapid growth in within-skill-group inequality in larger cities.

Did Highways Cause Suburbanization

Recent decennial censuses and the American Community Survey (ACS) collect data that permit construction of average hourly wage rates. However, reports concerning usual hours worked during the past year contain errors that create incredible implied wages for part-time workers.