Does Rapid Transit and Light Rail Infrastructure Improve Labor Market Outcomes?

Maysen Yen

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Public transit has often been proposed as a solution to the spatial mismatch hypothesis but the link between public transit accessibility and employment has not been firmly established in the literature. Los Angeles provides an interesting case study – as the city has transformed from zero rail infrastructure before the 1990s to a large network consisting of subway, light rail, and bus rapid transit servicing diverse neighborhoods. I use confidential panel data from the American Community Survey, treating route placement as endogenous, which is then instrumented by the distance from the centroid of each tract in LA to a hypothetical Metro route. Overall, I find proximity to Metro stations increases employment for residents, which is robust to using both a binary and continuous measure of distance. Additionally, I find evidence that increased job density in neighborhoods near new transit stations is contributing to the employment increase.

Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre and nep-ure
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https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2024/adrm/ces/CES-WP-24-22.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:24-22

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