講座主題：The Persistence of Urban Decline: Evidence from France's Largest Coal Basin

主講嘉賓：Hans Koster，阿姆斯特丹自由大學

講座時間：2024年4月4日（星期四）9:30——10:30

講座地點：bevictor伟德官网學院南路校區學術會堂606

嘉賓簡介：Hans Koster是阿姆斯特丹自由大學空間經濟系城市經濟學和房地産學教授，Tinbergen研究所和經濟政策研究中心(CEPR)的研究員。Hans主要研究涉及城市、地區和環境的經濟分析，試圖利用大數據和先進的計量經濟學技術來回答下列問題：我們如何應對城市人口持續增長帶來的挑戰？人們和企業如何争奪空間？土地使用法規的成本和收益是什麼？我們是否應該将公共資金投入到貧困社區，以縮小空間差距？相關成果發表在American Economic Journal: Economic Policy，Review of Economics and Statistics，Economic Journal，International Economic Review，Journal of Public Economics， Journal of Urban Economics 等頂級經濟學期刊。他的研究還受到了公衆的關注，多次被國家報紙和《經濟學人》引用。

内容摘要：Urban decline and urban growth are not two sides of the same coin. When local positive shocks occur it typically leads to an expansion of the building stock, but when negative shocks hit, the existing building stock persists. We use the history of coal production in France's largest mining basin as a source of exogenous variation in negative economic shocks. The geological delimitation of the basin and the placement of large-scale housing developments in close proximity to mines provide us with the opportunity to exploit very local spatial variation to identify the causal determinants of urban decline. We show that housing prices today drop by 11% when entering the mining basin. About 40% of this gap can be attributed to lower housing quality, with the remaining portion being ascribed to spillover effects. We proceed by setting up a dynamic spatial equilibrium model to disentangle the impact of spillovers and housing quality in determining the persistence of urban decline. Our model matches key moments in the data and predicts a protracted period of decline persisting for several decades before reaching a long-term equilibrium.