Airports and urban sectoral employment

By Nicholas Sheard. 2014

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper estimates the effects of airport infrastructure on relative sectoral employment at the metropolitan-area level, using data from the United States. To address the potential endogeneity in the determination of airport sizes, the 1944 National Airport Plan is used to instrument for the current distribution of airports. Airport size is found to have a positive effect on the employment share of tradable services, controlling for overall local employment, but no measurable effect on manufacturing or most non-tradable sectors. The effect of airport size on overall local employment is practically zero, suggesting that airports lead to specialization but not growth at the metropolitan-area level. The implied elasticity of tradable-service employment with respect to airport size is approximately 0.22. The results are relevant to the evaluation of airport construction or improvement projects that aim to benefit the local economy by making travel to and from the metropolitan area more convenient.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58c0518aebd35630a9eea687d1f002554b84043d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

  1. Fangni Zhang
  2. Daniel J. Graham
  3. Robert B. Noland
  4. D. Chatman
  5. R. Vickerman
  6. Adelheid Holl
  7. Chia-Lin Chen

In Strategy and Management

  1. Fangni Zhang
  2. Daniel J. Graham
  3. R. Vickerman
  4. Robert B. Noland
  5. D. Chatman
  6. Chia-Lin Chen

In Transportation

  1. Fangni Zhang
  2. Daniel J. Graham

Citations in the corpus