Stephen Redding: The Economics of Density
NYU Stern Urbanization Project Brown Bag Discussion Series
Thanks to Stephen Redding for leading a recent brown bag discussion on a working paper—The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall—that he coauthored with Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Daniel Sturm, and Nikolaus Wolf. Here's the abstract:
"This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to commuting decisions, which yield a gravity equation for commuting flows. To structurally estimate agglomeration and dispersion forces, we use data on thousands of city blocks in Berlin for 1936, 1986 and 2006 and exogenous variation from the city's division and reunification. We estimate substantial and highly localized production and residential externalities. We show that the model with the estimated agglomeration parameters can account both qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed changes in city structure."
Find a blog post about an earlier version of this working paper here.
Speakers
Stephen Redding is currently the Harold T. Shapiro *64 Professor in Economics in the Economics Department and Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is an international research associate of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, a research associate of the NBER international trade and investment program, a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a research associate of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and an international research fellow of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Prior to joining Princeton University, he was a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellowship during 2001-4 for his research on international trade and economic growth and a Global Economic Affairs Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in 2008. He was a visiting associate professor at the Department of Economics, Harvard University during Fall 2007, a Peter Kenen Fellow in International Economics at Princeton University during 2005-6, and a professor of economics at the Yale School of Management during 2008-9. He also worked as a research economist at the Bank of England, where his research on the relationship between international openness and economic growth was published as Openness and Growth, (eds) Proudman and Redding, Bank of England, London.
His research interests include international trade, economic geography, and productivity growth at the firm and industry level. Recent work has examined the relationship between comparative advantage and heterogeneous firms' response to international trade; the role of product choice in understanding firm development and industry dynamics; the uneven effects of Indian liberalization; the role of ‘absorptive capacity' in facilitating the international transfer of technology; and the role played by market access in determining economic prosperity.
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