Essays in urban economics

Madaleno, Margarida (2023) Essays in urban economics. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis consists of four policy impact evaluations that consider outcomes related to marriage, mental health, architectural valuation, and parenting. The first of these impact evaluations seeks to understand the extent to which accessing housing credit affects the decision to marry. To this end, it evaluates the impact of a series of maps, which the US government created in order to guide lending in the wake of the great depression. A federal government agency – known as the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) – assigned a grade to each neighbourhood block on a four point scale (A, B, C, D). These grades aimed to capture the extent to which houses in these blocks would appreciate or depreciate in the future. The maps were then circulated to banks. This chapter evaluates the impact of these maps on area-level marriage, finding that discriminated neighbourhoods had fewer married individuals. It also concludes that these effects are due to the mortgage mechanism per se, and are not simply a product of sorting. The second of these impact evaluations considers the effect of the covid-19 pandemic on mental health. It exploits quasi-exogenous variation in lockdown severity in the UK, paired with high-frequency mental health data derived from Tweets. It finds that the lockdowns did, indeed, have a negative effect on mental health. The third of these impact evaluations considers the extent to which architectural design is capitalised into commercial rents, with the goal of understanding whether passers-by value aesthetic features of the public realm. To this end, it uses Google Streetview data on the ornateness of London facades, and uses a town centre fixed effects specification. It finds that architectural ornateness of facades is capitalised into commercial rents, and that individuals are willing to pay for distinctive architecture within the public realm. The final impact evaluation considers the effect of neighbourhood crime on parenting, comparing effects for different populations. It finds that residents of social housing do not change parenting practices in response to increased crime, while private sector housing families do. These findings may be suggestive of dynamic complementarities between neighbourhoods and parenting investments.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2022 Margarida Madaleno
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Overman, Henry G. and Gibbons, Stephen
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4648

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