Abstract

Land prices provide information on the value of transport infrastructure and other public goods. We develop a general equilibrium model for home and job location, modal split, residential land use, and agglomeration effects on productivity. The model is estimated using data on wages, transport infrastructure, commuting behavior, land use and land prices for residential real estate, all at a detailed geographical level of 3000 Zip-codes in The Netherlands. We extend the standard multinomial logit model by a translog cost function for land use, which allows testing the model’s assumptions. We show that applying Bayes’ rule allows rewriting the home location model in a tractable form where the land price return for local amenities depends on the composition by education level of the population in the Zip code, as it should. We apply this model to analyze the effect of infrastructure on welfare and to the differences in location choices between education levels. The model allows us to make a decomposition of the economic effects by travel times, by modal split, by the thickening of labor markets, the agglomeration effect, spatial distribution of home and job location, and land use.

Coen Teulings is currently Professor at the University of Cambridge, with a part-time affiliation to the University of Amsterdam. Prior positions include the head of department of income policy at the Ministry of Social Affairs, the director of the Tinbergen Institute and later the director of the SEO Economic Research. From 2006 to 2013, prof. Teulings was the director of the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.

Coen Teulings is Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam since 2004. From 2006-2013 he was director of the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a major economic think tank in the Netherlands and the independent advisor of the Dutch government and parliament.