Régulation et Environnement

Du 21/10/2019 de 12:00 à 13:00

salle R1-13, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris

RUIZ Celia (PSE)

Agglomeration, Transport and Productivity: Evidence from Toulouse Metropolitan Area

Economic activity tends to be highly concentrated. These agglomeration or concentration forms are driven by spatial externalities on productivity, and are named agglomeration externalities. Transport improvements - by reducing the interaction cost between economic agents placed in different locations - can extend the geographic scope of these externalities on productivity. Furthermore, transport exposure also affects productivity directly as it may bring firm and employee relocations by making some places more attractive than others. Therefore, the objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to estimate the extent of agglomeration externalities at the urban scale, and secondly, to estimate the - direct and indirect - impact of transport exposure on productivity, using very fine georeferenced data on the road and public transport networks, and on more than one million employees working in a number of heterogeneous zones within Toulouse metropolitan area. This constitutes a valuable input for an urban planner who wants to maximize city’s wealth by identifying the disaggregated productivity impact of new transport infrastructure. To achieve these goals, we first estimate productivity effects of agglomeration and transport measures implementing a wage determination model using very disaggregated and georeferenced data of a sample of employees working in Toulouse in 2013 and 2015. We perform a two stage estimation approach (Combes et al. (2008)). The first stage of the regression allows us to assess the importance of industry effects and sector concentration characteristics against those highlighting true productivity differences across zones. In the second stage of the regression, we explain those productivity differences across zones - represented by the estimated first stage’s area-year fixed effects – by our local factors of interest: local employment density, and local transport exposure measures. Finally, and to have a full representation of transport impacts, we investigate the effect of transport exposure on local employment density. Our results suggest that out transport exposure measures have a substantial and significant effect on local productivity and local employment density.