SUL paper accepted to Urban Studies
The paper “The Impact of Human Capital and Housing Supply on Urban Growth” has been accepted by the journal Urban Studies. This is a top journal in the urban studies area.
The project was led by Simon Buechler, with coauthors Dongxiao Niu (former PhD student from Tsinghua and now a post-doc with Juan Palacios at U. of Maastricht), Annie Thompson, and Siqi Zheng. The team has been working on this paper for three years.
Uniquely, the paper includes empirical analysis for both the US and China, from a comparative study perspective; as well as a rigorous causal inference. The authors find that human capital positively impacts urban population, housing prices and wage growth in both US and China, with clear heterogeneity among cities and regions. Human capital increases productivity in both countries but is only a significant amenity feature in the US cities. Cities in both countries can benefit economically from reducing housing supply barriers to bolster urban economies and reduce social-spatial inequality. Below you can find the abstract of our paper.
Thank you Simon for taking the lead and congratulations to all our coauthors!