Concrete agglomeration benefits: do roads improve urban connections or just attract more people?

Michiel Gerritse and Daniel Arribas-Bel

Regional Studies, 2018, vol. 52, issue 8, 1134-1149

Abstract: Cities with more roads are more productive. However, it can be unclear whether roads increase productivity directly, through improved intra-urban connections, or indirectly, by attracting more people. Our theory suggests that population responses may obscure the direct connectivity effects of roads. Indeed, conditional on population size, highway density does not affect productivity in a sample of US metropolitan areas. However, when exploiting exogenous variation in urban populations, we find that highway density improves agglomeration benefits: moving from the 50th to the 75th percentile of highway density increases the productivity-to-population elasticity from 2% to 4%. Moreover, travel-based measures outperform population size as a measure of agglomeration externalities.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00343404.2017.1369023 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:regstd:v:52:y:2018:i:8:p:1134-1149

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CRES20

DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2017.1369023

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Studies is currently edited by Ivan Turok

More articles in Regional Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().