Essays on Urban Economics

[spa] In this dissertation I aim at documenting costs and benefits of cities through the lenses of transport economics. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I analyse on the long-term economic effects of transportation infrastructure on the reorganization of economic activity and the growth of cities. Differently, in the third and fourth chapters, I focus on two of the negative externalities that within city transportation imposes on urban residents: traffic and noise. In chapter two, titled "Paving the way to modern growth: the Spanish Bourbon roads", I analyse the local impact of increasing accessibility through transport networks. Specifically, I aim at estimating the potential impact that the improvements in accessibility associated to the construction of the new road network had on the population growth of Spanish municipalities between 1787 and 1857. One of the main challenges of this type of analysis is endogeneity. The advantage of the Spanish road network is that it did not seek specifically for routes with high potential trade but was instead explicitly designed to directly connect Madrid to the main cities of the country. To reinforce my case, I also adopt an inconsequential-unit approach, removing from the analysis the termini and other cities targeted in the network design, and considering only the municipalities which got accessibility due to their random location in the middle of two important cities. I find that the increase in market access associated to road accessibility had a substantial effect on local population growth. The impact was substantially higher on the municipalities that had a more diversified occupational structure. By contrast, the effect of the new network on population growth was negative in municipalities close but without direct access to the roads. I interpret these findings as evidence of a process of rural-to-rural migration due to the new roads. In the third chapter of this dissertation, titled "Low emission zones and traffic congestion: evidence from Madrid ...