Loss in the Time of Cholera: Long-Run Impact of a Disease Epidemic on the Urban Landscape
By Attila Ambrus, Erica M. Field, R. Gonzalez. The American Economic Review, 2020
130 citations recorded by the source corpus.
How do geographically concentrated income shocks influence the long-run spatial distribution of poverty within a city? We examine the impact on housing prices of a cholera epidemic in one neighborhood of nineteenth century London. Ten years after the epidemic, housing prices are significantly lower just inside the catchment area of the water pump that transmitted the disease. Moreover, differences in housing prices persist over the following 160 years. We make sense of these patterns by building a model of a rental market with frictions in which poor tenants exert a negative externality on their neighbors. This showcases how a locally concentrated income shock can persistently change the tenant composition of a block. (JEL D62, O18, R21, R31)
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb167b687cf9b70c1462e5354638a73cdb40f058
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Citations in the corpus
- The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for density: Evidence from the U.S. housing market (2020, unknown): “This paper contributes to the literature on how city structures change in the presence of the dispersion forces of diseases (Ambrus et al., 2020; Davis et al., 2021; Delventhal et al., 2021).”
- Housing markets in a pandemic: Evidence from historical outbreaks (2020, background): “They affected the entire population rather than a single neighborhood (Ambrus et al., 2020), and beyond their more substantial death toll, these epidemics likely distorted the economy more significantly than the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong (Wong, 2008).”
- Rising sea levels and sinking property values: Hurricane Sandy and New York’s housing market (2018, background): “…have fled from the flood zone toward other parts of the city. n fact selective out-migration has the potential to generate very peristent changes to the character of a neighborhood and to its housing rices, as illustrated in the study of the 1854 London cholera outbreak y Ambrus et al. (2016) .”