The Urban Economics Workshop 2025
空間情報科学研究センター（CSIS）との共催ワークショップ

Yao-Min Chiang（National Taiwan University）
Constrained Cities, Minimum Wage Polices, and House Prices
(with Jarjisu Sa-Aadu and James Shilling)

We consider The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 and examine the extent to which it influenced housing demand and construction costs in the United States. Utilizing difference-in-difference and two-way fixed-effects regression models, we analyze housing prices and starts across bound and unbound states, as well as constrained MSAs within bound states. Our findings reveal that the Act significantly increased housing demand, with higher cumulative post-abnormal housing returns in housing prices in bound states than unbound states using the two-way fixed-effects model. Additionally, we observe a substantial increase in housing construction costs in constrained MSAs These results highlight the complex spillover effects of minimum wage policies on housing markets and construction costs, providing a nuanced understanding of the economic impacts of the 2007 minimum wage increase.

Donald Davis（Columbia University）
"Segregation, Spillovers, and the Locus of Racial Change" (with Matthew Easton and Stephan Thies)

Existing empirical research in economics on neighborhood racial sorting is overwhelmingly premised on the idea that racial preferences for a location depend on the racial shares in that location, without considering potential spatial spillover effects from nearby areas. Does this matter for the way we view the cross-section and dynamics of racial neighborhood segregation? We nest Schelling (1971)'s bounded neighborhood and spatial proximity theories within a discrete choice model, where the key distinction is precisely such spatial spillovers. We simulate the model and examine the data for 1970-2000 for more than 100 U.S. metros. Two features of the data are most compelling: the powerful presence of racial clusters and the fact that drastic racial change is concentrated at the boundary of these clusters. Both point to the spatial proximity model as the proper foundation for a theory of racial neighborhood evolution. We use these insights to revisit prominent results on racial tipping where our theory guides us to distinguish differences by location. While prior research pointed to powerful racial tipping in the form of White exit, we show this is largely driven by theoretically-distinct “biased white suburbanization” leading to White entry in remote areas. In urban areas far from existing Minority clusters, we find zero or small tipping effects, at odds with a bounded neighborhood interpretation. The most consistent effects of tipping, still of modest size, are found in areas adjacent to existing Minority clusters, confirming the relevance of the racial spillovers of the spatial proximity model. Existing research conflates these quite distinct effects. Overall, our results suggests that tipping is a less central feature of racial neighborhood change than suggested in prior research and that greater attention needs to be paid to spatial dimensions of the problem.

Kwan Ok Lee (National University of Singapore)
TBA

UTokyo Center for Real Estate Innovation (CREI)–Jiro Yoshida
MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative–Siqi Zheng
UTokyo Urban Economics Workshop–Yasuhiro Sato and Takaaki Takahash

TBA