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Adieu Rabenmutter-culture, fertility, female labour supply, the gender wage gap and childcare
(2014)
This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour supply and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare provision are positively correlated with each other, while the gender wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fertility, female labour supply and childcare choices driven by cultural attitudes which fits these facts. There may exist multiple equilibria: one with zero childcare provision, low fertility and female labour supply and high wage gap and one with high childcare provision, high fertility and female labour supply and low wage gap.
We study the effect of energy and transport policies on pollution in two developing country cities. We use a quantitative equilibrium model with choice of housing, energy use, residential location, transport mode, and energy technology. Pollution comes from commuting and residential energy use. The model parameters are calibrated to replicate key variables for two developing country cities, Maputo, Mozambique, and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In the counterfactual simulations, we study how various transport and energy policies affect equilibrium pollution. Policies may be induce rebound effects from increasing residential energy use or switching to high emission modes or locations. In general, these rebound effects tend to be largest for subsidies to public transport or modern residential energy technology.
This chapter reviews the interplay of agglomeration and pollution as well as the effect of energy policies on pollution in an urban context. It starts by describing the effect of agglomeration on pollution. While this effect is theoretically ambiguous, empirical research tends to find that larger cities are more polluted, but per capita emissions fall with city size. The chapter discusses the implications for optimal city size. Conversely, urban pollution tends to discourage agglomeration if larger cities are more exposed to pollution. The chapter then considers various energy policies and their effect on urban pollution. Specifically, it looks at the effects of energy and transport policies as well as urban policies such as zoning.
This article studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium, the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home production of public goods and child care. We then study how child care provision affects the equilibrium. Due to specialization in home production, the incentive to use child care is smaller for married mothers than for single mothers. We show that this increases the number of single mothers and the divorce rate. Using survey data from Germany, we present suggestive empirical evidence consistent with this finding. (JEL codes: J12 and J13).
We use a quantitative spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the distributional and welfare impacts of a recent temporary rent control policy in Berlin, Germany. We calibrate the model to key features of Berlin’s housing market, in particular the recent gentrification of inner city locations. As expected, gentrification benefits rich homeowners, while poor renter households lose. Our counterfactual analysis mimicks the rent control policy. We find that this policy reduces welfare for rich and poor households and in fact, the percentage change in welfare is largest for the poorest households. We also study alternative affordable housing policies such as subsidies and re-zoning policies, which are better suited to address the adverse consequences of gentrification.
Is urbanization good for the environment? This paper establishes a simple core-periphery model with monocentric cities, which comprises key forces that shape the structure and interrelation of cities to study the impact of the urban evolution on the environment. We focus on global warming and the potential of unfettered market forces to economize on emissions. The model parameters are chosen to match the dichotomy between average "large" and "small" cities in the urban geography of the United States, and the sectoral greenhouse gas emissions recorded for the United States. Based on numerical analyzes we find that a forced switch to a system with equally sized cities reduces total emissions. Second, any city driver which pronounces the asymmetry between the core and the periphery drives up emissions in the total city system, too, and the endogenous adjustment of the urban system accounts for the bulk of the change in emissions. Third, none of the city drivers gives rise to an urban environmental Kuznets curve according to our numerical simulations. Finally, the welfare-maximizing allocation tends to involve dispersion of cities and the more so the higher is the marginal damage from pollution.
This paper presents the first investigation of the effects of optimal energy taxation in an urban spatial setting, where emissions are produced both by residences and commuting. When levying an optimal direct tax on energy or carbon use is not feasible, the analysis shows that exactly the same adjustments in resource allocation can be generated by the combination of a land tax, a housing tax, and a commuting tax. We then analyze the effects of these taxes on urban spatial structure, showing that they reduce the extent of commuting and the level of housing consumption while increasing building heights, generating a more-compact city with a lower level of emissions per capita.
We study optimal and equilibrium sizes of cities in a city system model with pollution. Pollution is a function of population size. If pollution is local or per-capita pollution increases with population, equilibrium cities are too large under symmetry; with asymmetric cities, the largest cities are too large and the smallest too small. When pollution is global and per-capita pollution declines with city size, cities may be too small under symmetry; with asymmetric cities, the largest cities are too small and the smallest too large if the marginal damage of pollution is large enough. We calibrate the model to US cities and find that the largest cities may be undersized by 3-4%.
We use panel data from Germany to analyze the effect of population density on urban air pollution (nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, ozone, and an aggregate index for bad air quality [AQI]). To address unobserved heterogeneity and omitted variables, we present long difference/fixed effects estimates and instrumental variables estimates, using historical population and soil quality as instruments. Using our preferred estimates, we find that the concentration increases with density for NO2 with an elasticity of 0.25 and particulate matter with elasticity of 0.08. The O-3 concentration decreases with density with an elasticity of -0.14. The AQI increases with density, with an elasticity of 0.11-0.13. We also present a variety of robustness tests. Overall, the paper shows that higher population density worsens local air quality.