The Urban Economics Workshop 2020
空間情報科学研究センター（CSIS）との共催ワークショップ

武田航平（LSE）
TBA

1. 「中核市移行の地方財政への影響に関する分析」

大都市制度によって規定される中核市は、広域自治体からの権限移譲が大きく、またブランドとしての効果も指摘されていることから現在も指定を目指している地方公共団体は少なくない。一方、実質的には人口要件のみで決まる中核市への移行が地方財政にもたらす影響は、団体の特徴によって異なることが想定される。本研究では中核市移行が地方公共団体財政に与えた影響について、Synthetic Control Methodを用いて、中核市移行による財政への影響を調べた。事務移譲によって最も影響が大きいと想定される民生費を目的変数とし、事例として旭川市、川口市、船橋市、高槻市の4市に関する推定を行った結果、民生費に与える影響については地方公共団体によってばらつきが見られ、統計的有意に支出を増加させたのは旭川市のみであった。本研究の結果から、地方公共団体の財政に対する中核市移行の影響は自治体の特徴や近接する経済圏、人口推移等によって異なることから、移行に伴う財源措置を講じるにも多面的な評価に基づく必要性が示唆されたと考える。

2. "Airport cities and social welfare （Yukihiro Kidokoro and Anming Zhang)"

This paper is concerned with the development of airport cities and social welfare. We analyze a typical non-aeronautical service of an airport, namely, airport shopping malls, by using a novel model that incorporates an endogenous change in varieties sold at airport malls and their substitutability with downtown stores. Larger airports do have more varieties of shops whose space can be changed by development. Our main results show that, first, airport malls developed by a local government or a profit-maximizing airport are too large as compared to the socially optimal size, because either entity disregards a decrease in profit at downtown stores when deciding on the size of airport malls. Second, the planner can attain the social optimality with the use of Pigouvian subsidies, even if it delegates its decision making to a local government or a profit-maximizing airport. Third, a local government or a profit-maximizing airport has an incentive to construct an airport that is too far away from downtown (or, has little incentive to improve airport access to/from downtown). The planner can nevertheless delegate its decision on airport location (or, airport access conditions) to either entity by using Pigouvian subsidies.  

A sanctuary policy is a policy that inhibits local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration authorities. Sanctuary policies have gained more attention in recent U.S. policy debates. Opponents claim that sanctuary policies attract criminals and lower the opportunity cost of crime through weaker sanctions and lower apprehension probability. Supporters counter that these policies produce a spiral of trust that supports police and raises informal social control over crime. Using city crime data from 1999 to 2010, I estimate the effect of sanctuary policies on crime. Using a difference-in-differences approach, this paper finds no evidence that sanctuary policies cause an increase in crime and some evidence that they may lead to a decrease in property crime. Moreover, further analysis confirms no pre-trend before the policy adoption and finds the effect strengthened over time after the adoption. The increased trust between residents and police is likely the reason for the negative effect.

山田昂弘（World Bank）
"The long-term causal effect of U.S. bombing missions on economic development: Evidence from Ho Chi Minh Trail and Xieng Khouang Province in Lao P.D.R. (with Hiroyuki Yamada)"  

This study investigates the long-term causal effects of U.S. bombing missions during the Vietnam War on later economic development in Laos. Following an instrumental variables approach, we use the distance between the centroid of village-level administrative boundaries and heavily bombed targets, namely, the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos and Xieng Khouang Province in northern Laos, as an instrument for the intensity of U.S. bombing missions. We use three datasets of mean nighttime light intensity (1992, 2005, and 2013) and two datasets of population density (1990 and 2005) as outcome variables. The estimation results show no robust long-term effects of U.S. bombing missions on economic development in southern Laos but show negative effects in northern Laos, even 40 years after the war. We also found that the results do not necessarily support the conditional convergence hypothesis within a given country, although this result could be unique to Laos.

　Large cities with central location excessively export to smaller cities in close proximity. Using Japanese inter-city trade data, we identify a substantial centrality bias: Exports from central places to their hinterland are 40%-100% larger than predicted by gravity forces. This upward bias stems from aggregating industries, which are hierarchically distributed across large and small cities. Decomposing the centrality bias along the margins of our data, we identify the extensive industry margin as the main driver behind this aggregation bias. Relying on a theory-consistent decomposition of the aggregate gravity equation, we also sort out the underlying theoretical channels that are responsible for the manifestation of the centrality bias.  

This paper examines the impacts of reducing earthquake risk on residential land prices in Tokyo, where the central and Metropolitan Government have emphatically promoted urban development for earthquake risk reduction. We use two types of earthquake risk measurement: (1) Tokyo’s assessments of community earthquake risk?building collapse risk, fire risk, and combined risk in the years 2002, 2008, 2013, and 2018; and (2) dense urban districts with extremely high risk from earthquakes (DUDs) in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2017. Our analysis uses non-spatial and spatial panel data models. The results of the non-spatial fixed-effects models show that a reduction in all our earthquake risk measures increases land prices. Moreover, the results of the spatial fixed-effects models demonstrate that a reduction in the fire risk, combined risk, and DUDs increases land prices not only in a lot’s own district, but also in neighboring districts, suggesting that the fire risk mitigation has a positive spillover effect. The total effects in the spatial models are greater than the marginal effects in the non-spatial models, highlighting the importance of considering spillover effects. Our findings shed new light on the benefits of urban development for earthquake risk reduction.