November 2012

IZA DP No. 7027: The Costs of Agglomeration: Land Prices in French Cities

published in: Review of Economic Studies, 2019, 86(4), 1556-1589

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.