Daniel Montolio (p), Xavier-Andoni Tibau

Petros Milionis

See extended abstract

Cathrine Ulla Jensen (p), Toke Emil Panduro, Bo Jellesmark Thorsen

Daniel Montolio

In this paper we offer a different take on the description of a key feature of the city. While we recognize that a city is a place where people work, it is most definitely also a place of living. In the sense that people live their lives there: buying groceries, meeting up at a café, watching a movie at the cinema and enjoying art at a gallery. We propose a new measure to capture the city-life or livability aspect of the neighborhood surrounding a dwelling. We measure the diversity of urban services available within a data informed radius. We find this measure to capture an aspect of quality that is clearly capitalized in the housing market and hypothesize that is the access to a vibrant city. We proceed to estimate the implicit price as well as the demand for this quality in a 1st and 2nd stage hedonic pricing study using the hedonic multiple markets approach. We identify five markets and cover rural areas with a very low level of urban diversity to one of the most urbanized areas in Denmark. We estimate a pricing function for each market and find that the number of different services, such as restaurants, cinemas, retail etc., within a 1 km radius of residence house increase sales price with 0.1-0.7 % for each additional service.
We estimate the demand of urban diversity and find a clear and negative relation between the price for diversity and demand. Living area is a substitute for urban service diversity. In the suburbs or more rural areas homes are in general larger than in the central city, but it comes at the cost of urban service diversity. We also find a relation between car-ownership, age and kids that supports the classic story of the suburbs. Households substitute a city life and a small apartment with living area, car and kids.

Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, Mariko Klasing, Petros Milionis (p)

Cathrine Ulla Jensen

We investigate how EU structural funds inuence economic development at the regional
level. Our analysis di¤ers from previous work on the topic in that (a) it distinguishes
between contemporaneous and lagged payments, (b) it separates between the amounts of
funds committed to each region and those actually paid out, and (c) it compares the impact
of fund payments in raising regional income levels and total factor productivity. We also
employ a novel approach in dealing with the endogeneity of structural fund payments. The
results of our analysis suggest that structural fund payments increase the levels of output
per capita in the recipient regions, but this boost is only temporary and does not lead to
more long-term increases in output and productivity.