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2025ECO008.pdf
Doctoral thesis

Regional and urban dynamics : essays on the spatial distribution of households and firms

  • 2025

PhD: Università della Svizzera italiana

Traffic
Income sorting
Relocation
Housing prices
Residential segregation
English This paper studies the effects of traffic exposure on the income sorting of heterogeneous residents. Exploiting the quasi-experimental setting of the introduction of a new road plan (PVP) implemented in a medium-sized Swiss city (Lugano), I use a structural model for residential location choices to estimate the effect of traffic exposure’s changes on housing rental prices, population relocation, and income-based residential segregation. I find that low-income renters migrate to neighborhoods with increased traffic levels, while high-income ones are more likely to cluster in less-trafficked areas. This mechanism is consistent with lower traffic exposure leading to higher housing prices, disproportionately affecting low-income households who spend a higher share of their income on housing. The model framework allows me to build counterfactual simulations; thus, I analyze the impact of a segregation-reductive traffic management policy: the local government can reduce residential segregation by deviating traffic in neighborhoods with a concentration of high-income households.
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  • English
Classification
Economics
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Open access status
green
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https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1333883
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