Alberto Hidalgo (p), Massimo Riccaboni, Francisco J. Velazquez

Eduardo Haddad

The economic landscape in urban areas is rapidly changing as peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation platforms enter the cities. As short-term rental platforms diffuse, studying their effect on the local economy is crucial, particularly their potentially uneven consequences across the urban geography. Since tourists are consumers with different needs and tastes, their arrival may change the economic activities around the new establishments. As short-term residents substitute long-term residents, the Airbnb-induced demand increases, potentially impacting stores locally. If, as Airbnb claims, guests prefer staying around and consuming near their listings, the arrival of these new temporal residents may represent a positive externality, leading to an increase in the demand for local consumption amenities like restaurants, coffee shops and other retail services.

To answer our research question, we must first solve the endogeneity issue coming from the non-random location of the Airbnb listings. To do so, we introduce a novel methodological approach to exploit the exogenous variation created by the unequal entry of Airbnb across the Madrid geography. To measure the impact of Airbnb on local consumption amenities, we use a Bartik-like instrumental variable (IV) approach, exploiting the number of rented houses in 2011 (before the Airbnb entry in Madrid) and the number of worldwide Airbnb Google searches as an instrument for the short-term rentals activity. Our IV approach relies on the importance of the stock of local supply rented houses before the Airbnb entry to explain the increase in the number of short-term rentals afterward. We exploit the sharp geographic and temporal variation in the availability of short-term rentals, using the census tracts as our main geographical units of analysis.

The main results show that the entry of Airbnb has positively impacted both the employment and the number of food and beverage establishments: an increase in ten Airbnb rooms in a given census tract translates into one more restaurant. The same increase in a given neighborhood generates nine new tourist-related employees. Interestingly, short-term rentals have a much stronger impact on local consumption amenities in less touristic areas, reinforcing the idea that peer-to-peer accommodations help redistribute tourism consumption over the city. Finally, we unveil the heterogeneous impact of Airbnb on local consumption amenities, identifying the restaurants and the coffees as the main activities benefited by the short-term rentals disruption. We find no evidence of pre-trends and our results are robust to sample composition, spatial spillovers and alternative measures of local consumption activities.

Ewa Dobrowolska (p), Katarzyna Kopczewska

Alberto Hidalgo

Literature offers many different methods for measuring the quality of life. However, currently known indices usually consider the population of the whole country or region, while much less they refer to a local areas. Thus, they inform only about the situation on a highly aggregated level and give no insight into the spatial distribution of quality of life within the local studied area. We are missing a well-built local index, which enable comparisons between the quality of life in small territories, such as city districts or local neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, even though urban economics literature indicates a few factors determining the local quality of life, such as access to green spaces or abundance of leisure facilities, this topic has not been carefully studied. Its importance is, however, undeniable – the information about the spatial distribution of quality of life within cities could be crucial not only to the local government deciding where to locate budget to help its citizens best, but also to entrepreneurs wondering where to invest or to people looking for a new place to live.
In this study, an example of Warsaw city is used to introduce a brand new approach for building a local quality of life index. Firstly, the city is divided into 1 km² grid cells. Secondly, for each cell separately there are calculated some economic factors that affect the quality of life, such as a number of shops and service premises, safety level, accessibility to public schools, universities, libraries or clinics, development of transport infrastructure, or greenness of the area, with an application of NDVI index. The next stage is to use all of these indicators to find the formula of the index and assign its value to each grid cell. Finally, the obtained results are analyzed, and several questions are answered: What is the spatial distribution of local quality of life? Are people living in the city centre better off than people living in the suburbs? How big is the difference? What can be said about the distributions when several cities are compared – are they similar, or do they vary? The last part of the project determines whether real estate prices correlate with the quality of life. For this purpose, we build a spatial econometric model and analyze its results.

Judit Berkes (p)

Ewa Dobrowolska

This research investigates the spatial concentration of highly qualified strata using statistical indicators and methods. Representation of highly qualified social strata means the spatial concentration of groups with higher social status (i.e. education level, foreign language skills, professional skills, and employment level) in the urban regions being studied; it does not coincide with mainstream definitions of social capital (based on interaction and networks between social groups). According to one of the most basic assumptions of the complex city concept, settlements with urban status are much more complex in terms of
their economic, social, and technical structure and their network relations and interactions than settlements that have not been declared as cities. Simultaneously, the difference in social composition between cities and other settlements cannot be disputed because the concentration of economic resources and activities and the potential of employment and the fact that higher income attracts skilled workers to the cities and their catchment areas; all of these resulting in a higher proportion of
highly qualified social strata. To meet the increasing needs of the global society and results of the transition to a market economy and globalization processes, a wider range of services are emerging, so the workforce is also undergoing significant differentiation, causing changes in the characteristics and composition of society. This research attempts to study these processes exploring the dynamic trends of
change in the spatial distribution of the examined groups. The author is looking for answers to questions such as how this aspect of society could be measured? Is there a difference in the structure of the society of urban centres and their catchment areas
regarding highly qualified groups? Has there been a change in the spatial-social characterristics of urban areas over the decades?

Eduardo Haddad (p), Inacio Araujo

Judit Berkes

The spurt of data and organized quantitative information from different archaeological sources has challenged established truths about the ancient economy in the last three decades. The range of tools and techniques for exploiting these archaeological sources has also grown dramatically. As a result, new questions are raised, which put our sources in a broader context that increasingly favors the long-term perspective. In this paper, we will discuss, using case studies, how the use of numbers can shed light in the study of ancient Greco-Roman history, with a particular interest in their economies. Our illustrative exercises focus on the use of regional science approaches, a discipline at the crossroads of economics and geography. We are particularly interested in Sir Alan G. Wilson’s seminal contributions as conducive to our exploration of digital numismatic databases to unravel spatial processes in the ancient world. Deriving from universal laws of physics, we will explore principles of spatial interaction modeling applied to numismatic data that will help understand spatial interaction processes in ancient economies. By measuring, mapping, and modeling archaeological observations (i.e., numismatic records), we expect to make sense of patterns in the data formally and to use these insights comparatively and longitudinally, as preconized by different authors.