Competing for opportunity: Transport infrastructures and localized unemployment

Guillaume Chapelle () and Morgan Ubeda
Additional contact information
Guillaume Chapelle: THEMA - Théorie économique, modélisation et applications - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - CY - CY Cergy Paris Université, LIEPP - Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d'évaluation des politiques publiques (Sciences Po) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po
Morgan Ubeda: CESAER - Centre d'économie et de sociologie rurales appliquées à l'agriculture et aux espaces ruraux - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - Institut Agro Dijon - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement

SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL

Abstract: Unemployment rates vary significantly across neighborhoods and worker types, yet the role of transport infrastructures in explaining these disparities remains unexplored. We propose a quantitative urban model with frictional unemployment and heterogeneous workers where better connections between neighborhoods might exacerbate unemployment disparities due to competition among workers. We document this phenomenon using a difference-indifferences to estimate the impact of the creation of the Paris Regional Express Rail (RER). We find that the project increased the unemployment rate of low-skilled workers, but not of their high-skilled counterparts. In Paris, differences in job market access reduce unemployment inequalities between college graduates and the rest of the population.

Keywords: Urban unemployment; Transport Networks; Spatial Mismatch; Unemployment dispersion; Spatial equilibrium model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02-11
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-04963164v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-04963164v1/document (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:hal:spmain:hal-04963164

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SciencePo Working papers Main from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Contact - Sciences Po Departement of Economics ().