讲座主题：The Persistence of Urban Decline: Evidence from France's Largest Coal Basin

主讲嘉宾：Hans Koster，阿姆斯特丹自由大学

讲座时间：2024年4月4日（星期四）9:30——10:30

讲座地点：中央财经大学学院南路校区学术会堂606

嘉宾简介：Hans Koster是阿姆斯特丹自由大学空间经济系城市经济学和房地产学教授，Tinbergen研究所和经济政策研究中心(CEPR)的研究员。Hans主要研究涉及城市、地区和环境的经济分析，试图利用大数据和先进的计量经济学技术来回答下列问题：我们如何应对城市人口持续增长带来的挑战？人们和企业如何争夺空间？土地使用法规的成本和收益是什么？我们是否应该将公共资金投入到贫困社区，以缩小空间差距？相关成果发表在American Economic Journal: Economic Policy，Review of Economics and Statistics，Economic Journal，International Economic Review，Journal of Public Economics， Journal of Urban Economics 等顶级经济学期刊。他的研究还受到了公众的关注，多次被国家报纸和《经济学人》引用。

内容摘要：Urban decline and urban growth are not two sides of the same coin. When local positive shocks occur it typically leads to an expansion of the building stock, but when negative shocks hit, the existing building stock persists. We use the history of coal production in France's largest mining basin as a source of exogenous variation in negative economic shocks. The geological delimitation of the basin and the placement of large-scale housing developments in close proximity to mines provide us with the opportunity to exploit very local spatial variation to identify the causal determinants of urban decline. We show that housing prices today drop by 11% when entering the mining basin. About 40% of this gap can be attributed to lower housing quality, with the remaining portion being ascribed to spillover effects. We proceed by setting up a dynamic spatial equilibrium model to disentangle the impact of spillovers and housing quality in determining the persistence of urban decline. Our model matches key moments in the data and predicts a protracted period of decline persisting for several decades before reaching a long-term equilibrium.