The Economics of Spatial Mobility: Evidence from Smartphone Data

Yuhei Miyauchi, Kentaro Nakajima and Stephen Redding

No 15839, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We develop a tractable quantitative framework for modelling the rich patterns of spatial mobility observed in smartphone data. We show that travel is frequently undertaken as part of a travel itinerary, defined as a journey starting and ending at home that can include more than one intermediate stop on a given day. We show that these travel itineraries provide microfoundations for consumption externalities and generate both complementarity and substitutability between locations. We show that the consumption externalities implied by travel itineraries are central to matching quasi-experimental evidence from the shift to WFH. We find that these consumption externalities are key drivers of the agglomeration of economic activity in central cities and shape the relative welfare gains from alternative transport improvements in favor of investments in central cities.

JEL-codes: O18 R12 R40 (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 (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15839 (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: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 Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().