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Title: Essays on environmental and urban economics
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2017
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Abstract: The thesis consists of three independent chapters on environmental and urban economics. A central theme explored in this thesis is what determines the distribution of economic activities across space. My exploration in this direction begins with the roles of industrial pollution and transportation infrastructure in shaping the spatial distribution of skills, and extends to evaluate the spatial allocation efficiency of renewable energy projects. The first chapter,“The Long Shadow of Industrial Pollution: Environmental Amenities and the Distribution of Skills”, investigates the role of industrial pollution in determining the competitiveness of post-industrial cities, with a focus on their ability to attract skilled workers and shift to a modern service economy. I assemble a rich database at a fine spatial resolution, which allows me to track pollution from the 1970s to the present and to examine its impacts on a whole range of outcomes related to productivity and amenity, including house prices, employment, wages, and crime. I find that census tracts downwind of highly polluted 1970s industrial sites are associated with lower housing prices and a smaller share of skilled employment three decades later, a pattern which became evermore prominent between 1980 and 2000. These findings indicate that pollution in the 1970s affected the ability of parts of cities to attract skills, which in turn drove the process of agglomeration based on modern services. To quantify the contribution of different mechanisms, I build and estimate a multi-sector spatial equilibrium framework that introduces heterogeneity in local productivity and workers’ valuation of local amenities across sectors and allows the initial sorting to be magnified by production and residential externalities. Structural estimation suggests that historical pollution is associated with lower current productivity and amenity; the magnitudes are higher for productivity, more skilled sectors and central tracts. I then use the framework to evaluate the impact of counterfactual pollution cuts in different parts of cities on nationwide welfare and cross-city skill distribution. The second chapter, “Travel Costs and Urban Specialization: Evidence from China’s High Speed Railway” examines how improvements in passenger transportation affect the spatial distribution of skills, exploiting the expansion of high speed railway (HSR) project in China. This natural experiment is unique because as a passenger-dedicated transportation device that aims at improving the speed and . . .
Url: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3560/
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Authors: Lin, Yatang
Institution: The London School of Economics and Political Science
Department: Economics
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Natural Resource Management, Other
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