The Costs of Agglomeration: Land Prices in French Cities

Pre-print, Working paper: We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French land price data. Our preferred estimate, which handles a number of estimation concerns, stands at 0.041. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent interest such as a distance gradient for land prices and the elasticity of unit land prices with respect to city population. For the latter, our preferred estimate is 0.72.

Author(s)

Pierre-Philippe Combes, Gilles Duranton, Laurent Gobillon

Date of publication
  • 2013
Keywords JEL
R14 R21 R31
Keywords
  • Urban costs
  • Land prices
  • Land use
  • Agglomeration
Internal reference
  • PSE Working Papers n°2013-28
Version
  • 1