Consumption Access and Agglomeration: Evidence from Smartphone Data

Stephen Redding, Yuhei Miyauchi and Kentaro Nakajima

No 15839, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We provide new theory and evidence on the role of consumption access in understanding the agglomeration of economic activity. We combine smartphone data that records user location every 5 minutes of the day with economic census data on the location of service-sector establishments to measure commuting and non-commuting trips within the Greater Tokyo metropolitan area. We show that non-commuting trips are frequent, more localized than commuting trips, strongly related to the availability of nontraded services, and occur along trip chains. Guided by these empirical findings, we develop a quantitative urban model that incorporates travel to work and travel to consume non-traded services. Using the structure of the model, we estimate theoretically-consistent measures of travel access, and show that consumption access makes a sizable contribution relative to workplace access in explaining the observed variation in residents and land prices across locations. Undertaking counterfactuals for changes in travel costs, we show that abstracting from consumption trips leads to a substantial underestimate of the welfare gains from a transport improvement (because of the undercounting of trips) and leads to a distorted picture of changes in travel patterns within the city (because of the different geography of commuting and non-commuting trips).

Keywords: Agglomeration; Urbanization; Transportation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R2 R3 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-tid, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15839 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumption access and agglomeration: evidence from smartphone data (2021)
Working Paper: Consumption access and agglomeration: evidence from smartphone data (2021)
Working Paper: Consumption Access and Agglomeration: Evidence from Smartphone Data (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15839

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15839

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().