Or Levkovich

Location choices of highly educated foreign workers: the importance of urban amenities

In the globalized economy the presence of migrants is essential for urban and regional growth, and it is therefore important to know what makes a city an attractive place for highly skilled migrants. This paper aims to shed light on this issue by considering the location choice of highly-educated foreign workers, and if and how their valuation of urban amenities differs from domestic workers. To do so, we apply a residential location-choice model to estimate the attractiveness of residential locations in the Dutch Randstad for low and high-skilled, domestic and foreign workers, and calculate and compare their willingness to pay for each of these amenities.

The Value of Proximity to Water in Residential Areas

Proximity to water is appreciated by households. Hedonic analyses that try to measure the value of this amenity are potentially biased by omitted variables as locations close to the water may be selected by households with higher incomes who construct more luxury houses. Since it is difficult to observe all relevant characteristics, the coefficient for proximity to water may be biased upwards. We circumvent this problem by exploiting a specific characteristic of the Dutch system of planned residential development: often a number of identical houses are constructed close to each other. By comparing the values of such identical houses, we can measure the effect of proximity to water under almost ideal circumstances. The results show a significant impact of this amenity, but of a smaller magnitude than was suggested by many earlier studies, thereby confirming the conjectured presence of omitted variable bias.

Estimating the Value of Proximity to Water, When Ceteris Really Is Paribus

Proximity to water is appreciated by households. Hedonic analyses that try to measure the value of this amenity are potentially biased by omitted variables because locations close to water may be selected by households with higher incomes who construct more luxury houses. Because it is difficult to observe all the relevant characteristics, the coefficient for proximity to water may be biased upwards. We circumvent this problem by exploiting a specific characteristic of the Dutch system of planned residential development: often a number of exactly similar houses are constructed close to each other. By comparing the values of such identical houses, we can measure the effect of proximity to water under almost ideal circumstances. Introduction of these fixed effects lowers the estimated impact of this amenity, thereby confirming the conjectured presence of an omitted variable bias.

Spatial Planning and Segmentation of the Land Market: The Case of the Netherlands

Zoning restrictions often exclusively permit one or a few particular types of land use. If the tightness of restrictions differs between land uses, the result may be that the market for land splits into segments referring to particular uses, because the arbitrage mechanism between various land use types is turned off. We provide evidence of such a segmentation of the Dutch land market into three compartments: agricultural, commercial, and residential use. We analyze transactions of ready-to-be developed land and find that residential land is much more expensive than commercial land. We also find that agricultural land is much cheaper than residential and commercial land. (JEL R21, R52)

The impact of highways on population redistribution: The role of land development restrictions

We study the role of land development restrictions for the effects of highway expansion on the spatial distribution of population. We demonstrate that these restrictions strongly interfered with the effects of highways in the Netherlands. Introducing an IV approach to address endogenous interaction variables, our findings show that new highways accelerated population growth in peripheral areas, but had no such effect in central cities and suburban municipalities. We find that due to development restrictions near larger cities, the highway expansion caused a ‘leapfrog’ pattern, in which suburban growth skipped development-restricted areas and expanded into farther located peripheral areas.