The Costs of Agglomeration: House and Land Prices in French Cities

By Pierre-Philippe Combes, Gilles Duranton, L. Gobillon. The Review of Economic Studies, 2018

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French house and land price data. After handling a number of estimation concerns, we find that the elasticity of urban costs increases with city population with an estimate of about 0.03 for an urban area with 100,000 inhabitants to 0.08 for an urban area of the size of Paris. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent interest such as the share of housing in expenditure, the elasticity of unit house and land prices with respect to city population, and within-city distance gradients for house and land prices.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4eaf784fe50ce1bd44e405409081519fd6b45f70

Citations in the corpus

• The economic effects of density: A synthesis (2019, unknown): “This effect is qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the positive effect of city size on the density elasticity of rent documented by Combes et al (2018) for French cities.”