Exponential or Power Distance-decay for Commuting? An Alternative Specification

Jacob J. de Vries (), Peter Nijkamp and Piet Rietveld
Additional contact information
Jacob J. de Vries: Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

No 04-097/3, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: In this paper we determine the effect of transport cost on commuting flows, on the basis of an analysis of home-to-work journeys between municipalities in Denmark. Special attention is given to a proper estimation method and the form of the distance-decay function. It appears that neither an exponential nor a power distance-decay function fits the data well. The specification of log trips as a (downwards) logistic function of log cost results in a better fit. We find that the cost elasticity of commuting reaches a value of –4 for distances around 24 km, while it is close to 0 for both very short and very long distances. Finally, we demonstrate that the choice of functional form for distance-decay can make an important difference for predictions concerning the effect of infrastructure improvements on commuting flows.

Keywords: Spatial Interaction; Distance-decay Function; Commuting; Denmark; Estimation; Heteroscedasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J61 R15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-09-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/04097.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Exponential or Power Distance-Decay for Commuting? An Alternative Specification (2009)
Working Paper: Exponential or power distance-decay for commuting? An alternative specification (2005)
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:tin:wpaper:20040097

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().