Fabien Moizeau (Université de Rennes 1)

Who Lives Where in the City? Amenities, Commuting and Income Sorting

Résumé

We study the sorting of income-heterogeneous consumers within cities. We allow for non-homothetic preferences and locations that are differentiated by their distance to employment centers and accessibility to exogenous amenities. The residential equilibrium is driven by the properties of an amenity-commuting aggregator obtained from the primitives of the model. Using micro-data on the Netherlands, we find that doubling the amenity level, (resp. employment accessibility), attracts households whose incomes are 2.5% (resp. 4% higher). Using the model's structure and estimated parameters, we predict the impact of counterfactual changes in accessibility and amenities on the social structure of Dutch cities.

co-authors: Carl Gaigné (INRA, UMR1302, SMART-LERECO Rennes (France) and CREATE, Laval University, Quebec (Canada)), Hans R.A. Koster (Department of Spatial Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands), HSE University (Russian Federation), Tinbergen Institute, and CEPR and Jacques-François Thisse (CORE-UCLouvain (Belgium), HSE University (Russian Federation) and CEPR)

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