Urban Economics Lab
The Urban Economics Lab at MIT focuses on studying economic activity and economic trends in cities. The Lab uses analytical models and big data to understand what makes cities thrive or decline, how housing values are formed and oscillate, and how local politics and social phenomena manifest in the context of increasing global urbanization.
Latest News
New Working Paper - Immigration and Native Flight
Is ethnic segregation driven by native flight or immigrant self-isolation? If the former, which natives avoid immigrants? Which immigrants? What is the geographic scope of homophilic residential preferences?
Our new working paper, "Immigrants and Native Flight: Geographic Extent and Heterogeneous Preferences," by Albert Saiz and Vinicios Sant'Anna, with Bence Boje-Kovacs, Ismir Mulalic, and Marie Schultz-Nielsen, answers these questions.
Using comprehensive administrative data for the entire population of Denmark and leveraging the quasi-random nature of refugee placements, we propose a novel Arrival-Stayer Markov Instrumental Variable (ASM-IV) to generate experimental variation regarding local immigrant arrivals.
We find strong evidence of native flight, even at the building level. Flight is stronger among the older population and a reaction to the arrival of low-income immigrants. As neighborhoods become more immigrant-dense, housing prices decline, and subsequent move-ins are more likely to be other immigrants or young, low-income native citizens without children. Natives moving out of immigrant-dense neighborhoods tend to move to new homes in areas that are distinctively more "native."
CRED - MIT Workshop on Real Estate Economics
Our lab members Vinicios Sant'Anna and Simon Büchler presented at the CRED - MIT Workshop on Real Estate Economics at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
See the workshop agenda (here).
Working Paper - Natural Barriers and Urban Connectivity
How does the presence of natural barriers influence transportation environments and urban densities across the globe?
This paper introduces three novel indexes: the share of natural barriers, non-convexity (a measure of natural fragmentation), and the average road detour, to measure and study the practical reach and effects of natural barriers around global cities. It calculates these indexes for areas in and around four separate global city-boundary definitions, augmenting the original data with relevant additional variables.
Natural barriers lead to more complex transportation environments and are associated with higher urban densities, smaller urbanized footprints, taller buildings, and less pollution, but also with lower incomes and smaller populations. To draw meaningful policy conclusions, comparative research about environmental, economic, and social outcomes across global cities should always account for their surrounding geographies.
