 Slum growth in Brazilian citiesJournal of Urban Economics, 2021, vol. 122, issue C Abstract: This paper studies slum growth in Brazilian cities by estimating a spatial equilibrium model with two types of households and two types of housing. I explain the positive correlation observed between slum growth and economic growth in cities with three IV-estimated structural elasticities. The number of low-income households in a city increases with wages with an elasticity of 1.7. Housing rents increase with housing demand with elasticities of 0.37 for non-slum housing and 0.07 for slum housing. Economic growth in cities thus causes slum growth because it attracts large number of low-income households who face higher rent growth for non-slum than slum housing. I further show that as economic growth improves households’ incomes nationwide, an income effect reduces the national slum share. Finally, I find that two policy-relevant counterfactuals significantly increase aggregate income by relocating households into high-wage cities: 1) slum upgrading in high-wage cities 2) reducing the elasticity of non-slum housing rents to housing demand shocks. Keywords: Housing; Slums; Urbanization; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:122:y:2021:i:c:s0094119021000097 DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2021.103327 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Urban Economics is currently edited by S.S. Rosenthal and W.C. Strange More articles in Journal of Urban Economics from Elsevier |
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