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Essays on a City’s Assets: Agglomeration Economies and Legacy Capital

Park, In Kwon
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269458854

Abstract Details

2010, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, City and Regional Planning.
This dissertation presents five essays dealing with the utilization and abandonment of a city’s assets, in particular two key assets: agglomeration economies and legacy capital. The first essay traces out the causes and effects of agglomeration economies by disentangling economies of agglomeration. It disentangles amenity and productivity effects of agglomeration; it decomposes aggregate scale effects into agglomeration factors of interest to policy makers; and it estimates own effects and spillovers to neighbors. It proposes a spatial simultaneous equations model in a spatial equilibrium framework with three agents – worker consumers and producers of traded goods and housing. Results for Ohio counties estimate economies resulting from population size, agglomeration causes, and public service quality and cost on each of the three agents in own and neighboring counties. The second essay theoretically models the abandonment and reuse of legacy capital in the process of industrial restructuring. It aims to identify the conditions for abandonment and the factors that determine the length of abandonment. The model is based on investment theory and game theory. It shows that abandonment is impacted by conversion costs of legacy capital, the rate of growth of industries involved in the restructuring, and policy variables such as tax rate. The third essay empirically verifies the theoretical model developed in the second essay, using data of industrial and commercial properties (ICPs) in the Cleveland city-region in Ohio. It shows that in declining industries or regions, ICPs experience tax delinquency of longer duration and are more likely to be abandoned than elsewhere. Also, ICPs with higher conversion costs are more likely to experience longer spells of tax delinquency and are more likely to be abandoned than others. Abandoned ICPs are spatially concentrated either as a result of negative spillovers or shared history. The fourth essay theoretically models the externalities involved in the abandonment and conversion of abandoned properties, and suggests a Pigouvian subsidy to encourage conversion and to restore the social optimum. As the size of the externality depends on the level of abandonment, a socially optimal subsidy is derived as a function of a city’s share of abandoned to total capital. The paper also models land use conversion as function of ownership fragmentation and compares the timing of conversion for the single and fragmented ownership case. The last essay empirically examines how legacy capital and agglomeration economies affect urban growth. This essay employs a series of regressions to investigate the relationship, using a sample of central cities in Metropolitan Statistical Areas of the U.S. It shows that for economies facing deindustrialization, a speedy reuse of legacy capital encourages economic resurgence; sustained abandonment reduces growth; and agglomeration economies facilitate urban growth or retard urban decline.
Burkhard von Rabenau (Committee Chair)
Jean-Michel Guldmann (Committee Member)
Philip Viton (Committee Member)
267 p.
Economics; Urban Planning
city assets; agglomeration economies; legacy capital; urban decline; deindustrialization; abandonement; conversion; industrial and commercial properties; spatial dependence; spatial econometrics; Tobit models; discrete choice models; Ohio; Cleveland

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Park, I. K. (2010). Essays on a City’s Assets: Agglomeration Economies and Legacy Capital [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269458854

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Park, In Kwon. Essays on a City’s Assets: Agglomeration Economies and Legacy Capital. 2010. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269458854.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Park, In Kwon. "Essays on a City’s Assets: Agglomeration Economies and Legacy Capital." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269458854

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.