The political geography of cities
Presented by Richard Bluhm with P. Schaudt and C. Lessmann
This paper studies the causal effect of gaining and losing the status as a subnational political capital on urban development.
We make three contributions. First, we provide a global data set of hundreds of first order administrative and capital city reforms over the period from 1990 until 2014. Second, we combine these reforms with remotely-sensed daytime images to detect urban boundaries and nighttime lights to measure economic activity at the city level. Third, using an event study design, we show that gaining subnational capital status has a sizable effect on city growth.
The effect is not uniform across the level of development, but greater in countries where urbanization and industrialization occurred later. We provide first evidence that locating subnational capitals in areas with better locational fundamentals, e.g. better market access, has a substantially larger effect on economic activity than in cities where fundamentals are lacking.
These findings illustrate that there are limits to how much politics can shift economic activity into the hinterland in the medium run.
SoDa Labs webinar series
The SoDa Labs webinar series provides a platform for researchers around the world to present work that uses novel and alternative data and/or tools from data science and beyond to answer social science questions.
Event Details
- Date:
- 11 August 2020 at 9:00 am – 10:00 am
- Venue:
- Online
- Categories:
- Economics; Econometrics and Business Statistics; General
Description
Presented by Richard Bluhm with P. Schaudt and C. Lessmann
This paper studies the causal effect of gaining and losing the status as a subnational political capital on urban development.
We make three contributions. First, we provide a global data set of hundreds of first order administrative and capital city reforms over the period from 1990 until 2014. Second, we combine these reforms with remotely-sensed daytime images to detect urban boundaries and nighttime lights to measure economic activity at the city level. Third, using an event study design, we show that gaining subnational capital status has a sizable effect on city growth.
The effect is not uniform across the level of development, but greater in countries where urbanization and industrialization occurred later. We provide first evidence that locating subnational capitals in areas with better locational fundamentals, e.g. better market access, has a substantially larger effect on economic activity than in cities where fundamentals are lacking.
These findings illustrate that there are limits to how much politics can shift economic activity into the hinterland in the medium run.
SoDa Labs webinar series
The SoDa Labs webinar series provides a platform for researchers around the world to present work that uses novel and alternative data and/or tools from data science and beyond to answer social science questions.
Event Contact
- Name
- SoDaLabs@monash.edu
- Phone
- Organisation