Externalities In The Housing Market And Agglomeration Economies

Title:

Externalities In The Housing Market And Agglomeration Economies

ABSTRACT

This thesis studies the externalities in the housing market and agglomeration economies. The first chapter studies the impact of universities on local innovation activity by exploiting a unique university expansion policy in China as a quasi-experiment. In this chapter, we take a geographic approach, empowered by geocoded data on patents and new products at the address level, to identify knowledge spillovers as an important channel. We obtain three main findings. First, university expansion significantly increases universities' own innovation capacity, which results in a dramatic boom of local industry patents. Second, the impact of university expansion on local innovation activities attenuates sharply within 2 kilometers of the universities. Third, university expansion boosts nearby firms' new products and the number of nearby industrial patents that cite university patents but not industry patents that cite patents far away from universities. In the second chapter, we propose a high-order spatiotemporal autoregressive model with unobserved cluster and time heterogeneity to study the externalities in the housing market. Real estate prices arrive sequentially on different housing units over time in a large volume. When the numbers of clusters and time segments are finite and the errors are iid, quasi maximum likelihood method is used for model estimation and inference. In the presence of unknown heteroskedasticity, or there are large number of clusters and/or time segments, an adjusted quasi score method is proposed. Methods for constructing the space-time connectivity matrices are proposed. Monte Carlo experiments are performed for assessing the finite sample properties of the proposed methods. An empirical application is presented using the housing transaction data in Beijing. We find that the estimation of the spatiotemporal interaction effects are largely affected after controlling for cluster heterogeneity at the community level. The third chapter studies another important but under-explored aspect of the agglomeration economies -- the role that the marriage market plays in providing incentives to promote urbanization. Previous literature studying urbanization and migration has mainly considered incentives arising from cross-city variation in productivity and the subsequent labour market outcomes. In this chapter, we study the migration incentives arising from the matching outcomes in the marriage market and the gender differences in responding to such incentives. To achieve identification, we exploit two quasi-experimental settings that exogenously trigger urbanization across locations, which leads to a unique feminization phenomenon during this process. This chapter highlights important distributional implications on gender inequality and spatial disparity during the rapid urbanization process.

PRESENTER

WU Yifan
PhD Candidate
School of Economics
Singapore Management University

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE:

Chair:
Professor YANG Zhenlin
Professor of Economics & Statistics
Singapore Management University

Committee Member:
Professor LI Jing
Assistant Professor of Economics
Singapore Management University

Professor Jungho LEE
Assistant Professor of Economics
Singapore Management University

External Member:
Professor DENG Ying
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of International Business and Economics

RESEARCH FIELDS

Urban Economics, Spatial Econometrics

DATE:

24 June 2022 (Friday)

TIME:

10.00 am

VENUE:

SOE Seminar Room 4.1, Level 4
School of Economics
Singapore Management University
90 Stamford Road
Singapore 178903