Search

This paper studies regional impact of three mature public surface transportation infrastructures in the Northeast corridor of the US: highway, public railway and public transit. Infrastructure stock is valued in real terms from 1991 to 2009. A spatial panel approach with fixed effects is adopted to test the hypothesis of spillovers by allowing for spatial dependence. The result shows that public surface transportation infrastructure in general does have a significant impact on regional output, most of which is from spillover effect; highways have an overwhelming influence through both local effects and spillover effects. The impacts from public railway and public transit are not significant, but transit does show a positive though small spillover effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Duranton and Turner estimated the impact of interstate highways on the average growth of US cities between 1983 and 2003. By estimating a structural model, one of their striking points is that increasing a city's initial stock of highways by 10 per cent leads to a 1.5 per cent positive respond of the city's employment over the sample period. This note mainly argues that their investigation leaves out potential spillovers of labour input from neighbouring growth centres/cities in the steady-state directly implied by the open city assumption. More specifically, this contribution readily extends Duranton and Turner's work by a general equilibrium effect induced by the urban system's labour market fluctuations which is a direct consequence of the open city assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]