Regional Borders, Commuting and Transport Network Integration

Gabriel Loumeau

No 20-489, KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

Abstract: I study how and why economic activity varies around regional borders. Spatial quasi-experimental variation around French departmental borders reveals discontinuous commuting and residential patterns. To tackle the endogenous border placement problem, I exploit a geometric border design proposed during the French Revolution. I then calibrate a spatial quantifiable general equilibrium framework to structurally match the quasi-experimental estimates. The commuting and residential discontinuities are well explained by a 7km bilateral distance penalty when crossing regional borders, which is the consequence of the decentralized planning and development of local transport networks. Policy simulation shows that integrating local transport networks leads to a 11.7% average growth in real per capita residential income.

Keywords: Border; Commuting; Discontinuity; Transport network; Decentralization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 R12 R42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000458728 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:kof:wpskof:20-489

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().