Gilles Duranton

Jane Jacobs, a personal assessment. Regional Studies 51(12), 1871-1873, 2017

Comments: Saving the heartland: Place-based policy in 21st Century America Brookings Paper of Economic Activity 223-240, 2018

Gilles Duranton and Tony Venables, “Place-based policies for development”. In Handbook of Regional Science, Manfred Fisher and Peter Nijkamp (eds) Springer-Verlag, Berlin, edited by, (2020)

Gilles Duranton and Erick Guerra, “Transport modes and cities”. In Encyclopedia of Transportation, Elsevier, edited by, (2020)

Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga (2020), “The economics of density”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34(3), 3-26, 2020, .

Gilles Duranton, Geetika Nagpal, Matt Turner (2020), “Transportation infrastructure in the US”, edited by Ed Glaeser and Jim Poterba, NBER volume, 2021, .

Abstract: Support for massive investments in transportation infrastructure, possibly with a change in the share of spending on transit, seems widespread. Such proposals are often motivated by the belief that our infrastructure is crumbling, that infrastructure causes economic growth, that current funding regimes disadvantage rural drivers at the expense of urban public transit, or that capacity expansions will reduce congestion. In fact, most US transportation infrastructure is not deteriorating and the existing scientific literature and does not show that infrastructure creates growth or reduces congestion. However, current annual expenditure on public transit buses exceeds that on interstate construction and maintenance. The evidence suggests the importance of an examination of how funding is allocated across modes but not of massive new expenditures.

Gilles Duranton, Laurent Gobillon, Pierre Philippe Combes (2018), “The production function for housing”, accepted for publication, Journal of Political Economy, .

Abstract: We propose a new nonparametric approach to estimate the production function for housing. Our estimation treats output as a latent variable and relies on the first-order condition for profit maximi-sation with respect to nonland inputs by competitive house builders combined with their zero-profit condition. Differences in the demand for housing across locations lead to differences in land prices and, in turn, differences in nonland input investments. For parcels of a given size, we compute housing production by summing across the marginal products of nonland inputs. We implement our methodology on newly built single-family homes in France. After taking care of estimation concerns, we find that the production function for housing is reasonably well, though not perfectly, approximated by a Cobb-Douglas function and close to constant returns after taking care of estimation concerns. We estimate an elasticity of housing production with respect to nonland inputs of about 0.65.

Gilles Duranton, Prottoy A. Akbar, Victor Couture, Adam Storeygard (Under Revision), “Mobility and congestion in urban India”, under revision, new version coming soon.

Abstract: Using a popular web mapping and transportation service, we generate information for more than 22 million counterfactual trip instances in 154 large Indian cities. We then use this information to estimate several indices of mobility for these cities. We first show that our measurements are robust to a wide variety of methodological choices. Second, we decompose overall mobility into uncongested mobility and the congestion delays caused by traffic. Third, we examine correlates of mobility, uncongested mobility, and traffic delays. Finally,we also provide a preliminary exploration of walking and transit trips.

Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga, “Urban growth and its aggregate implications”, under revision.

Abstract: We develop an urban growth model where human capital spillovers foster entrepreneurship and learning in heterogeneous cities. Incumbent residents limit city expansion through planning regulations so that commuting and housing costs do not outweigh productivity gains from agglomeration. The model builds on strong micro-foundations, matches key regularities at the city and economy-wide levels, and generates novel predictions for which we provide evidence. It can be quantified relying on few parameters, provides a basis to estimate the main ones, and remains transparent regarding its mechanisms. We examine various counterfactuals to assess the effect of cities on economic growth and aggregate output quantitatively.

Gilles Duranton, Marie-Pierre de Bellefon, Pierre Philippe Combes, Laurent Gobillon (2018), “Delineating urban areas with building density”, Journal of Urban Economics, 2021, .

Abstract: We develop a new dartboard methodology to delineate urban areas using detailed information about building location, which we implement using a map of all buildings in France. For each pixel, our approach compares actual building density after smoothing to counterfactual smoothed building density computed after randomly redistributing buildings. We define as urban any area with statistically significant excess building density. Within urban areas, extensions to our approach allow us to distinguish ‘core’ urban pixels and detect centres and subcentres. Finally, we develop novel one- and two-sided tests that provide a statistical basis to compare maps with different delineations, which we use to assess the robustness of our approach and to document large differences between our preferred delineation and the corresponding official one.