Gilles Duranton's research while affiliated with University of Pennsylvania and other places
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Publications (136)
Support for massive investments in transportation infrastructure, possibly with a change in the share of spending on transit, seems widespread. Such proposals are often motivated by the belief that our infrastructure is crumbling, that infrastructure causes economic growth, that current funding regimes disadvantage rural drivers at the expense of u...
La densidad urbana incrementa la productividad y la innovación, mejora el acceso a bienes y servicios, reduce las necesidades de viaje, fomenta edificios y formas de transporte energéticamente eficientes, y facilita la provisión de servicios compartidos. Sin embargo, la densidad también es sinónimo de congestión, hace más costoso vivir y moverse en...
This chapter explores the range in types of urban travel throughout cities and regions around the world. Although there is often substantial variation in mode splits within cities and metropolitan areas, we focus our discussion around the most common modes and some of the common features that help to define and differentiate the cities that rely on...
This paper provides a discussion of the choices that need to be made to classify locations and aggregate them into larger units such as cities or metropolitan areas. It also selectively surveys related literature with a focus on the contributions published in this special issue.
Density boosts productivity and innovation, improves access to goods and services, reduces typical travel distances, encourages energy efficient construction and transport, and allows broader sharing of scarce urban amenities. However, density is also synonymous with crowding and makes living and moving in cities more costly. We explore the appropr...
We develop a new dartboard methodology to delineate urban areas using detailed information about building location, which we implement using a map of all buildings in France. For each pixel, our approach compares actual building density after smoothing to counterfactual smoothed building density computed after randomly redistributing buildings. We...
We estimate the effect of urban form on driving. We match the best available travel survey for the US to spatially disaggregated national maps that describe population density and demographics, sectoral employment and land cover, among other things. To address inference problems related to sorting and endogenous density, we develop an estimator tha...
We investigate determinants of driving speed in large U.S. cities. We first estimate city-level supply functions for travel in an econometric framework where the supply and demand for travel are explicit. These estimations allow us to calculate an index of driving speed and to rank cities by driving speed. Our data suggest that a congestion tax of...
I develop a systematic approach to examine the drivers of population growth in Colombian cities between 1993 and 2010. Fertility plays an important role. Much of the higher growth of some Colombian cities can also be associated with higher wages. In turn, this wage advantage of some cities can be, in part, traced back to city education and industry...
We provide an integrated treatment of the theoretical literature on urban land use inspired by the monocentric model, including extensions that deal with multiple endogenous business centers, various dimensions of heterogeneity, and durable housing. After presenting the theory and distilling its key empirical implications, we critically review the...
Ce travail compare les distributions de salaires et de qualifications de l’Île-de-France et du reste du pays. Les salaires sont plus élevés en Île-de-France de 24 %. Ces différences relèvent pour le quart de qualifications plus élevées et pour le reste d’une plus grande productivité francilienne. Nous montrons aussi que les disparités de salaires s...
I estimate an elasticity of wages with respect to city population of about 5 percent for Colombian cities. This finding is robust to a number of econometric concerns. The second main finding is a negative effect of market access on wages. Third main finding regards stronger agglomeration effects in the informal sector. In turn, this explains a rang...
This paper discusses the need to delineate metropolitan areas and current practice in several countries. It argues for the use of a simple algorithm that examines cross-municipality commuting patterns. Municipalities are aggregated iteratively provided they send a share of their commuters, above a given threshold, to the rest of a metropolitan area...
This chapter first discusses the necessity of defining metropolitan areas and current practice in several countries. It argues for the use of a simple algorithm that exploits cross-municipality commuting patterns. Municipalities are aggregated iteratively provided they send a share of their commuters above a given threshold to the rest of a metropo...
This review discusses frontier topics in economic geography as they relate to firms and agglomeration economies. We focus on areas where empirical research is scarce but possible. We first outline a conceptual framework for city formation that allows us to contemplate what empiricists might study when using firm-level data to compare the functionin...
We compare the distributions of wages and worker skills for the Greater Paris region to the rest of France. Wages are 24% higher in Greater Paris relative to the rest of the country. Greater skills of Parisian workers account for about a quarter of this difference while the greater productivity of the capital region accounts for the rest. We also s...
Why do cities grow in population, surface area, and income per person? Which cities grow faster and why? To these questions, the urban growth literature has offered a variety of answers. Within an integrated framework, this chapter reviews key theories with implications for urban growth. It then relates these theories to empirical evidence on the m...
I estimate the effect of major roads within and between cities on the level and composition of trade for Colombian cities. I confirm that road distance between cities is a major impediment to trade. In addition, major roads within cities have a large effect on a city׳s exports and imports with an elasticity of approximately 0.20 estimated with ols...
We exploit a 1991–2010 Tanzanian household panel to assess the effects of the temporary refugee inflows originating from Burundi (1993) and Rwanda (1994). We find that the refugee presence has had a persistent and positive impact on the welfare of the local population. We investigate the possible channels of transmission, underscoring the importanc...
This chapter discusses the literature on agglomeration economies from the perspective of jobs and job dynamics. It provides a partial review of the empirical evidence on agglomeration externalities; the functionality of cities; the dynamic relationship between cities, jobs, and firms; and the linkages between cities. We provide the following conclu...
This paper examines the effects of urbanization on development and growth. It begins with a labor market perspective and emphasizes
the importance of agglomeration economies, both static and dynamic. It then argues that more productive jobs in cities do
not exist in a void and underscores the importance of job and firm dynamics. In turn, these dyna...
This paper employs a unique Italian data source to take a comprehensive approach to labour market pooling. It jointly considers many different aspects of the agglomeration — labour market relationship, including turnover, learning, matching, and hold up. It also considers labour market pooling from the perspective of both workers and firms and acro...
Ce travail compare tout d'abord les distributions de salaires et de qualifications de l'Ile-deFrance et du reste du pays. Les salaires sont plus élevés en Ile-de-France de 24%. Ces différences relèvent pour le quart de qualifications plus élevées et pour le reste d'une plus grande productivité francilienne. Nous montrons aussi que les disparités de...
We estimate the effect of interstate highways on the level and composition of trade for US cities. Highways within cities
have a large effect on the weight of city exports with an elasticity of approximately 0.5. We find little effect of highways
on the total value of exports. Consistent with this, we find that cities with more highways specialize...
This paper reviews recent empirical research on the growth of US cities. Several key drivers of urban growth have been identified: roads, amenities, human capital, entrepreneurship and agglomeration effects, housing supply constraints, and industry shocks. The implications of these findings for local economic development policies are also discussed...
We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French house and land price data. After handling a number of estimation concerns, we find that the elasticity of urban costs increases with city population with an estimate of about 0.03 for an urban area with 100,000 inhabitants to 0.08 for...
This paper provides descriptive evidence about the distribution of wages and skills in denser and less dense employment areas in France. We confirm that on average, workers in denser areas are more skilled. There is also strong overrepresentation of workers with particularly high and low skills in denser areas. These features are consistent with pa...
Taxes levied on the sale or purchase of real estate are pervasive but little studied. By exploiting a natural experiment arising
from Toronto's imposition of a Land Transfer Tax (LTT) in early 2008, we estimate the impact of real estate transfer taxes
on the market for single family homes. Our data show that Toronto's 1.1% tax caused a 15% decline...
There are large differences in economic development across Native American reserva-tions today. This paper asks whether these differences can be in part explained by the forced integration of historically autonomous sub-tribal bands in the 19th century. To measure forced integration, I combine anthropological data on intra-tribal political in-tegra...
L'enquête sur le prix des terrains à bâtir (EPTB) fait ressortir trois groupes de facteurs expliquant le prix du mètre carré (m2) de terrain dans les aires urbaines en France métropolitaine en 2008. Tout d'abord, un terrain est d'autant plus cher au m2 qu'il se situe dans une aire urbaine densément peuplée et/ou en forte croissance démographique. E...
The development of clusters of economic activity is an important feature of industrial policy. Industry clusters have long fascinated economists and geographers alike, the most renowned being Silicon Valley which is seen by many as the blueprint for regional development, innovation, and growth. Several clusters have also developed across Europe, in...
Measures of urban productivity are typically positively associated with city population. But is this relationship causal? We discuss the main sources of bias in the proper identification of agglomeration effects. We also assess a variety of solutions that have been proposed in the literature to deal with them.
This paper empirically disentangles the different roles of geography in shaping the European city system. We present a new database that covers all actual cities as well as potential city locations over the period 800 – 1800, when the foundations for the European city system were laid. We relate each location's urban chances to its physical, first...
This paper proposes a theory of city size distribution via a hierarchy approach rather than the popular random growth process. It does so by formalizing central place theory using an equilibrium entry model and specifying the conditions under which city size distribution follows the power law. Central place theory describes the way in which a hiera...
This chapter addresses the issues of endogenous quantity and endogenous quality of labor, provides a simple model of productivity and wages in cities, and discusses the two main estimation issues. It presents the wage data and the worker-fixed approach to the endogenous quality of labor bias. Cities attract skilled workers so that the effects of sk...
Asymmetric information about product quality is an endemic problem in international trade. We examine how the availability of profit-maximizing trade intermediaries affects the exporting decisions and quality choice of producers in the presence of such asymme-tries. In our model, the fixed exporting cost arises endogenously; it consists of (a) the...
Large cities produce more output per capita than small cities. This may occur because more talented individuals sort into large cities, because large cities select more productive entrepreneurs and firms, or because of agglomeration economies. We develop a model of systems of cities that combines all three elements and suggests interesting compleme...
We study the determinants of the firm-level choice to produce following an order placed by a downstream firm (production to order) or to produce in advance. We rationalize this choice through a simple theoretical model and apply it to a firm-level empirical analysis. Relying on a large dataset of Italian manufacturing firms, we show that two main v...
We investigate the relationship between interstate highways and highway vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) in US cities. We find that VKT increases proportionately to highways and identify three important sources for this extra VKT: an increase in driving by current residents; an increase in transportation intensive production activity; and an infl...
Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two explanations have been offered: agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity) and firm selection (larger cities toughen competition allowing only the most productive to survive). To distinguish between them, we nest a generalised version of a semina...
Key words: institutions family types education social capital labor force participation economic wealth and dynamism regions Europe abstract This article examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and eco-nomic indicators across regions in Europe. Using E...
abstractThis article examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd's classification of medieval European family systems, we identify potential links between family types and regional dispa...
This paper reviews the evidence about the effects of urbanization and cities on productivity and economic growth in developing countries using a consistent theoretical framework. As in developed economies, there is strong evidence that cities in developing countries bolster productive efficiency. Regarding whether cities promote self-sustained grow...
This study first summarises the forces that affect positively and negatively the spatial concentration of economic activity, and the bell curve that links general transaction costs to regional disparities. The specific role played by local labour markets is then detailed. While spatial concentration enables a larger division of labour, it also prov...
Does productivity increase with density? We revisit the issue using
French wage and TFP data. To deal with the ‘endogenous quantity of labour' bias (i.e., urban agglomeration is consequence of high local productivity rather than a cause), we take an instrumental variable approach and introduce a new set of geological instruments in addition to stan...
We use a point-pattern methodology to explore the detailed location patterns of UK manufacturing industries. In particular, we consider the location of entrants and exiters vs. continuing establishments, domestic- vs. foreign-owned, large vs. small, and affiliated vs. independent. We also examine co-localisation between vertically linked industries...
While transport costs have fallen, the empirical evidence also points at rising total trade costs. In a model of industry location with endogenous transaction costs that seeks to replicate features from the machinery industry, we show how and under which conditions a decline in transport costs can lead to an increase in the total cost of trade. The...
We estimate the effects of interstate highways on the growth of U.S. cities between 1983 and 2003. We find that a 10% increase
in a city's initial stock of highways causes about a 1.5% increase in its employment over this 20 year period. To estimate
a structural model of urban growth and transportation, we rely on an instrumental variables estimati...
Le 12 juillet 2005, le gouvernement a labellisé 67 « pôles de compétitivité » ou clusters. Ils sont aujourd'hui au nombre de 71. La politique d'aménagement du territoire est passée d'une intervention publique destinée à aider les régions en difficulté à une politique visant à encourager les plus dynamiques. Un objectif d'efficacité s'est ainsi subs...
This study examines the case for cluster policy. This case is theoretically ambiguous and empirically very weak.
The Toronto Land Transfer Tax, implemented nearly a year ago, has had significant negative effects on the housing market, reducing sales and lowering average house prices.
Regional economic growth in Portugal has mainly been studied from the perspective of convergence with data ending by the early 2000’s. The country as a whole has stopped converging to the output levels of the richest European countries by this period and has also become one of the most unequal EU member-states in terms of income distribution in the...
This article provides a general overview of spatial economics, which covers location theory, spatial competition, and regional and urban economics. After a brief review of the main theoretical traditions, the fundamental role of non-convexities and imperfect competition is highlighted. The main challenges faced by theoretical and empirical research...
This paper evaluates, in the context of economic geography estimations, the magnitude of the distortions possibly induced by the choice of a given spatial nomenclature, something also known as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (henceforth MAUP). Based on three stan-dard economic geography exercises (the analyze of spatial concentration, of agglomer...
With the use of French and US data, new and systematic evidence is provided about the rapid location changes of industries across cities (the fast). Cities are also slowly moving up and down the urban hierarchy (the slow), while the size distribution of cities is skewed to the right and very stable (the still). The model proposed here reproduces th...
With the use of French and US data, new and systematic evidence is provided about the rapid location changes of industries across cities (the fast). Cities are also slowly moving up and down the urban hierarchy (the slow), while the size distribution of cities is skewed to the right and very stable (the still). The model proposed here reproduces th...
In this paper we use the
C.o.i
. survey and the « Techniques et Organisation du Travail » (1987, 1993) surveys to document workplace communication patterns in urban, suburban and rural areas. Workers in large cities communicate more than workers in small cities and then more in small cities relative to rural areas. However, there are no clear spat...
We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints are interpreted as shadow taxes that increase the land rent of already developed plots and reduce the amount of new housing developments. In general equilibrium, locations with nicer a...
This paper explores how the distribution of industry across political districts influences trade policy choice in the presence of electoral incen-tives. We develop a political agency model, with a continuum of political districts and political term limits, in which incumbent politicians may im-plement trade policy strategically to attract voters in...
We study the impact of local taxation on the location and growth of firms. Our empiricalmethodology pairs establishments across jurisdictional boundaries to estimate the impact of taxation. Our approach improves on existing work as it corrects for unobserved establishment heterogeneity, for unobserved time-varying site specific effects, and for the...
This paper uses a unique labour force survey to document workplace communication patterns in urban, suburban and rural areas. A number of interesting stylised facts are distilled relating to workplace communication: its intensity, within-firm communication, communication external to the firm and the media being used with a special focus on informat...
This paper embeds the canonical model of endogenous growth with product proliferation developed by Romer [Romer, P.M., 1990. Endogenous technical change. Journal of Political Economy 98, S71–S102] into a simple urban framework. This yields a reduced form isomorphic to the popular statistical device developed by Simon [Simon, H., 1955. On a class of...
This special issue contains papers by both economists and geographers on agglomeration and growth. In this introduction, we
first provide a brief sketch of recent developments in the interaction between economists and geographers. We then propose
some contextual background to make it easier for geographers to approach the economics papers of this i...
When firms cluster in the same local labour market, they face a trade-off between the benefits of labour pooling (i.e., access to workers whose knowledge help reduce costs) and the costs of labour poaching (i.e., loss of some key workers to competition and a higher wage bill to retain the others). We explore this tradeoff in a duopoly game. Dependi...
ABSTRACT This paper takes seriously the idea that international trade has played an important role in explaining both some convergence between developed economies as well as rising inequalities at the personal level. Previous studies used traditional trade theory as a reference framework. The empirical consensus is now that differences in factor en...
Les fondements économiques de la concentration spatiale des activités en ville reposent, en partie, sur l'hypothèse de l'existence d'un gain de productivité lié à la plus grande possibilité d'échanges d'informations pertinentes en face-à-face, sans surcoût (en particulier de transport), dans les lieux à forte densité. La mesure de ces externalités...
We consider the literature on urban systems and New Economic Geography to examine questions concerning agglomeration and how areas respond to shocks to the economic environment. We first propose a diagrammatic framework to compare the two approaches. We then use this framework to study a number of extensions and to consider several policy relevant...
This paper provides some evidence that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the (local) market. We first propose a theoretical model. Its main prediction is that scarce occupations are over-represented in large cities. Using census data for French cities, we then provide strong empirical support for this prediction.
To study the detailed location patterns of industries, and particularly the tendency for industries to cluster relative to
overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localization. In contrast to previous studies, our approach allows
us to assess the statistical significance of departures from randomness. In addition, we treat space a...
This paper analyses the agglomeration patterns for 26 manufacturing and services sectors in Paris and its surroundings in 1999. We adopt a methodology allowing the measurement of the degree of spatial agglomeration and the identification of location patterns of economic sectors. First, we compute the locational Gini coefficient and Moran's I statis...
This paper develops a general equilibrium theory of endogenous firm and class formation under non-contractibility with heterogeneous individuals. A collectivist economy, a private-ownership economy, and a mixed economy are compared on the basis of identical economic fundamentals (methodological symmetry). Each economic system generates specific ine...
This paper embeds the canonical model of en-dogenous growth with product proliferation developed by Romer (1990) into a simple urban framework. This yields a reduced form isomorphic to the popular statistical device developed by Simon (1955), which in turn can yield Zipf's law for cities. The uncertainties and unevenness associated with the outcome...
In this paper, the concept of production systems is introduced. I assume a standard thick-market externality together with the idea that higher quality goods also require higher skills from workers. Firms face a trade-off between low-quality goods with low skill-requirements for which the potentially abundant labour force generates strong thick-mar...
Spatial wage disparities can result from spatial differences in the skill composition of the workforce, in non-human endowments, and in local interactions. To distinguish between these explanations, we estimate a model of wage determination across local labour markets using a very large panel of French workers. We control for worker characteristics...
This handbook chapter studies the theoretical micro-foundations of urban agglomeration economies. We distinguish three types of micro-foundations, based on sharing, matching, and learning mechanisms. For each of these three categories, we develop one or more core models in detail and discuss the literature in relation to those models. This allows u...
This Paper studies the theoretical micro-foundations of urban agglomeration economies. We distinguish three types of micro-foundations, based on sharing, matching, and learning mechanisms. For each of these three categories, we develop one or more core models in detail and discuss the literature in relation to those models. This allows us to give a...
Citations
... For alternative and more optimistic perspectives, see the RAND Corporation report by Knopman et al. (2017) (available online at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR 1739.html) and the analysis by Duranton, Nagpal, and Turner (2021), who conclude that much US transportation infrastructure is not crumbling, with the exception of subways. 4 The 2021 grades range across 17 categories from a B in Rail to a D-in Transit, with eleven category grades in the D range (Aviation, Dams, Hazardous Waste, Inland Waterways, Levees, Public Parks, Roads, Schools, Stormwater, Transit, and Wastewater) and only six categories in C-or higher range (Bridges,Drinking Water,Energy,Ports,Rail,and Solid Waste). ...
Reference: What drives road infrastructure spending?
... This section reviews the theoretical and empirical research on the relationship between urban agglomeration and entrepreneurship. Since it is a core topic in economic geography, there is a rich body of literature dedicated to agglomeration economies [3,5,12,14,17]. While it has long been established that the spatial concentration of firms and workers increases productivity, theoretically, the benefits of agglomeration accumulate faster initially, but eventually, costs prevail as population and density increase in cities [18,19]. Therefore, we next theoretically approach the effects of agglomeration on entrepreneurship from the benefit-cost perspective. ...
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... Se parte de la posibilidad de que las características de la localización estén vinculadas con la distribución de los contaminantes en el espacio. En Estados Unidos y Europa se han estudiado los efectos del tamaño de las ciudades en su relación con los costos pecuniarios y medioambientales (Glaeser y Kahn, 2010;Kahn, 2010;Combes et al., 2019). Sin embargo, estos análisis no consideran los efectos espaciales entre regiones vecinas, por lo que los estimadores hallados presentarían un sesgo por la autocorrelación de las observaciones. ...
... 3 2 Small & Winston (1988) find that the cost to resurface a lane-mile is 113,000 usd1984 per lane-mile for urban roads, converting to 2010usd using the ppiaco, gives 200,000. 3 For clarity, we note that Smith et al. (1999) rely on highway statistics table sf12 to measure construction costs. As we discuss below, this table aggregates the sf12a data that we rely on to measure separately Our analysis of the user cost of the interstate is organized around an optimal capital stock problem. ...
... Estimation of the (mean) housing production function has enjoyed a recent renaissance (e.g., Albouy and Ehrlich, 2018;Brueckner et al., 2017;Cai et al., 2017;Combes et al., 2021;Epple et al., 2010) but it deals mostly with single family housing. We are aware of only a few papers that deal with building height. ...
Reference: Regulation and Frontier Housing Supply
... and that the median estimate of the elasticity of housing production with respect to capital over the sample of cities is 0.87 (interquartile range of 0.79-0.92). Our results are in line with Epple et al. (2010), who estimate a land elasticity of 0.14, but slightly differ from Combes et al. (2021), who estimate a capital elasticity of 0.65 for France. ...
... However, this identification is not easy and several identification methods has been proposed to overcome the weaknesses of existing methods [2][3][4][5]. Moreover, highly granular and multiplex datasets have recently become available and have driven the development of relevant methods [6]. ...
... It helps bridge the gap between the advanced knowledge on developed world cities and the nascent research on developing world urbanization, as pointed out by Bryan et al. (2020) and Glaeser and Henderson (2017)). Moreover, it also adds to the emerging literature on the application of point-specific and high-resolution data in analyzing the effects of urbanization (see previews by Duranton and Rosenthal (2021) and Ahlfeldt and Gobillon (2021)). ...
... Rapid urbanisation and economic development have led to an upsurge in private vehicle ownership resulting in traffic congestion and parking stress in most of the Indian cities (Akbar et al., 2018). Hence, strengthening the existing public transport system through policies is necessary to curb the huge dependence on private vehicles and ensure sustainable transportation. ...
... Land appears to be a minor concern in services. Duranton et al. (2016) compared the role of factor market distortions in services with the manufacturing sector. As most services tend to be less landintensive compared with manufacturing, they argued that land distortions have not constrained productivity growth in services. ...
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