Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Chambers College of Business and Economics

Department

Economics

Committee Chair

Brad Humphreys

Committee Co-Chair

Feng Yao

Committee Member

Feng Yao

Committee Member

Adam Nowak

Abstract

This dissertation "Three Essays in Urban and Regional Economics" contains three chapters which explore urban and regional economics. The first chapters focuses on examining the effect of stadiums on congestion; the second chapter on the effect of military base closures on the housing market; and the third chapter is a meta-analysis on historical instrumental variables.

The first chapter examines the effect of National Football League games on traffic congestion in Cincinnati, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; and Santa Clara, California during the 2018 and 2019 seasons. By linking sporting events to traffic congestion, this paper provides the mechanism for stadiums generating additional externalities such as pollution and lower emergency vehicle response rates. Additionally, by utilizing Uber's high-frequency vehicle movement speed data at the hourly level on individual road segments, this paper breaks from traditional annualized data which captures traffic conditions peripheral to those generated by stadiums. This paper finds traffic speed declines range from 0.32 to 4 miles per hour, up to 7-miles from a stadium. Converting the average speed decline into a time delay, and utilizing the average city wage provides a congestion cost estimate ranging from \$108,000 - \$19 million per NFL home game.

The second chapter examines the effect of the US government's Base Closure and Realignment policy on counties in the US from 1998 and 2020 on the housing price index. The policy was announced in 2005, and saw military bases across the US being permanently shut-down or realigned to other military purposes from 2007 to 2011. This paper expands on the current literature by examining the changes in the housing price index using fixed effects difference in difference model. The results show that military base closures had a positive impact on the housing price index, but a negative impact on the growth of the housing price index. This suggest that after the 2005 BRACs announcement, there was an increase in the housing price index due to higher demand, but lower growth compared to counties without a military base.

The third chapter examines the exclusion restriction's role in ensuring that the historical instrumental variable only affects the dependent variable through the independent variable in instrumental variable regression models. However, the elapsed time between the historical instrument and contemporary covariates may allow alternative channels of influence to develop between the historical instrument and contemporaneous variables. These channels can lead to persistence in unobserved historical covariates, violating the exclusion restriction. This paper analyzes potential bias generated by the time elapsed between the measurement of infrastructure historical instruments and contemporary covariates on reported IV results in the urban and regional economics literature.

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