| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation consists of three essays at the intersection of urban and transport economics. While they do not use common data or methods, they all tackle fundamental issues concerning the effects of transport on people's life and on urban and extra-urban dynamics.
Chapter 2 contributes to an intensively discussed topic, namely the emergence of Zipf's Law and Gibrat's Law. The former posits that cities size and its rank are inversely proportional, while the latter points out that there is no correlation between cities size and their growth level.
It focuses on a sample of cities in Britain, between 1801 and 2011, and examines their size, rank and growth level to show that conclusions depend on city definition, sample cutoff and regression methods. It also points out that Zipf?s Law cannot be rejected under the strongest combination of data and methods, unlike if other data or methods are used. Finally, across Zipf, Gibrat and Gini analyses, it finds that urban concentration in Britain peaked in the mid-19th century but fell 1861-1911 and 1951-1991.
Chapter 3 examines the impact of investments in transport infrastructure in an urban context. It focuses in particular on the case of Dublin and, through the calibration of a structural model, it retrieves the necessary parameters to obtain a measure of improved market access, which reflects the reduced commuting costs, induced by the presence of a new light rail metro system, the Luas. Subsequently, it inspects the relation between improved market access and population density, skill composition and rent level. It finds that improved market access increases the share of resident population, however it points out that the increase is driven by high-skilled workers; in fact the share of resident low-skilled workers decreases with improved market access. The opposite is true for workplace population, i.e. population working in an area. In this case, more low-skilled workers are likely to work in an area better served by transport, while no significant effect is found for high-skilled workers. Finally, it does not find an effect on long-term rents, however, because of lack of reliable data so far, it cannot rule out yet an effect on short-term, market rents.
Chapter 4 explores the effects of the process of rail liberalisation in Europe, which started more than two decades ago. While it focuses on the case of Italy, it reflects well the results obtained in other countries for other transport markets and it therefore allows to generalise the results. This chapter points out that a reduction in prices linked to the presence of competition is very short-lived and becomes inexistent in less than a year, with little exceptions. The frequency and the level of service, on the other hand, benefit, however, in a weakly correlated manner with prices. | en |
