Suchergebnisse

1 Introduction -- 1.1 The Problem -- 1.2 The Analytical Tools -- 1.3 A Summary of the Book -- A: General -- 2 Individual Choice Behaviour -- 3 Uncertainty and the Consistency of Discrete Choice Models -- 4 From Micro to Meso Choice Analysis -- 5 Allocation of Actors within the Model -- 6 The Meso-Model and its Dynamics -- B The Housing Market -- 7 The Housing Market: Specification of a Model -- 8 Household Demography -- 9 Optimal Household Behaviour and Housing Choice -- 10 Choice Behaviour in the Dutch Housing Market -- 11 Evaluation and Conclusion -- List of References.

The debate about the effectiveness of investments in public infrastructure initiated by Aschauer suggests that there may be substantial discrepancies between the results of conventional cost-benefit analysis and the ultimate effects of such investments on welfare. This paper takes a closer look at this issue by investigating the existence of secondary or indirect effects under conditions of monopolistic competition. We find that such effects will in general exist, and that they are potentially large, but that they can also be negative, depending on the specification of the model. With linear demand curves, indirect effects can be positive, zero or negative, with Dixit-Stiglitz they are always nonnegative and closely related to the taste for diversity, while with the logit model they are always identically zero. Free entry reinforces the positive indirect effects in the Dixit-Stiglitz model, and causes negative indirect effects in the logit model. Given this variety of results, robust empirical measurement of the indirect effects appears to be difficult.

ABSTRACT  This paper argues that search theory is a useful addition to the way economists and geographers have approached the study of commuting behavior. This is illustrated by showing that introduction of a spatial element into the standard model of job search leads to the prediction of critical isochrones. Moreover, in the context of an urban economy with decentralized employment, the spatial search model predicts excess commuting. Search theory also suggests that regression toward the mean may play a confusing role in data describing the development of commutes over time, such as has been used in recent empirical work. Finally, the paper develops a simple spatial equilibrium search model in which employers set their wages optimally and searchers determine their reservation wages optimally in mutually consistent ways. The spatial element is crucial for the existence of such an equilibrium in which reservation wages of all searchers and wages set by all employers are identical.

This paper assesses the value of Dutch museums using information about destination choice as well as about the number of trips undertaken by an actor. Destination choice is analyzed by means of a mixed logit model, and a count data model is used to explain trip generation. We use a utility-consistent framework in which the discrete choice model for destination choice is linked to an indirect utility function. The results are used to compute the compensating variation of particular museums and of the total group of museums in the sample.

How should urban containment and the diversion of households to nearby residential areas be evaluated from a welfare economic perspective? Assuming the existence of a negative externality of city size, we develop a concise general equilibrium model for a mother city and a satellite. This satellite should be founded if the gain in surplus exceeds the fixed costs of intercity infrastructure provision, and a Pigouvian tax on the conversion of land to urban use in both cities would then attain the first-best allocation. Rising incomes and falling transport costs enhance the surplus gain from 'clustered deconcentration', or the accommodation of growth in planned satellites, relative to expansion of the mother city. Nevertheless, plans by the Dutch government to uphold strict growth controls around Amsterdam, while fostering large-scale residential construction projects in the nearby satellite of Almere, are difficult to reconcile with the optimal policy in a calibrated version of our model.

In spite of a growing recognition of the importance of supply conditions for the level and volatility of house prices, empirical work on housing supply outside the US is scarce. This paper considers various measures of housing supply in the Netherlands, where real house prices have roughly tripled since 1970. Besides the volume of investment in residential structures, and new housing construction in units, we derive time series of structure and location quality in a hedonic analysis. Each of these variables appears to be almost fully inelastic with respect to house prices in at least the short to medium long run. Further analysis of the quality of location index shows that conventional models of competitive land and housing markets cannot account for these findings. However, they may be well explained in terms of the rather extensive body of interventions by the Dutch government.

In spite of a growing recognition of the importance of supply conditions for the level and volatility of house prices, empirical work on housing supply outside the US is scarce. This paper considers various measures of housing supply in the Netherlands, where real house prices have roughly tripled since 1970. Besides the volume of investment in residential structures, and new housing construction in units, we derive time series of structure and location quality in a hedonic analysis. Each of these variables appears to be almost fully inelastic with respect to house prices in at least the short to medium long run. Further analysis of the quality of location index shows that conventional models of competitive land and housing markets cannot account for these findings. However, they may be well explained in terms of the rather extensive body of interventions by the Dutch government.

ABSTRACT  This paper discusses various aspects of the economic analysis of commuting behavior. It starts with a review of two difficulties associated with urban economics models: the empirically falsified prediction of the relation between commuting time and income, and the presence of substantial excess commuting. Notwithstanding these anomalies, research that focuses directly on the value of travel time provides evidence that there is substantial resistance against commuting among large groups of workers. However, commuting costs are just one among many other explanatory variables for actual commuting behavior, and commuting itself has become much less onerous over time. This suggests that commuting costs play a much more limited role than has been assumed in the past. On the other hand, empirical evidence suggests that space is more important than one would be inclined to think on the basis of the considerations just given. These empirical regularities suggest that other space‐related aspects of the functioning of urban labor and housing markets are more important than was previously thought.