Abstract: Do central slums provide essential economic and social benefits to the poor? We collected bespoke data for 5,000 households to study mass forced clearances in Addis Ababa. Evictees were offered alternative subsidized housing further from the center. Exploiting sharp clearance zone boundaries, regression-discontinuity estimates show negative impacts on social networks, but positive impacts on work, earnings, housing quality and environmental amenity. Relocating households close to their ex-ante neighbors eliminates social costs. Slums are not essential: relocation policies can be designed to fully compensate residents, and the sale value of cleared land more than covers the cost.

Abstract: The global fashion market continues to expand, yet fast fashion items are often discarded prematurely, generating substantial textile waste. Despite the industry’s large environmental footprint, few economic models address the structure of fashion and apparel markets. This paper develops a simple model of a differentiated durable-goods market, extending the CES monopolistic competition framework of Dixit and Stiglitz (1977). Durable goods last multiple periods but degrade over time. Firms introduce new varieties each period, and with free entry the number of varieties is determined endogenously. With an infinitely lived consumers, we analyze the roles of secondary markets. With representative consumers, the option to resell acts as a demand subsidy, lowering new-goods prices, increasing total durable-goods production, reducing product variety, and lowering consumer welfare. With heterogeneous consumers who differ in preferences for new versus second-hand goods, we find that a larger share of second-hand–goods lovers can raise resale prices, lower new-goods prices, reduce product variety, and increase total production. However, with two product types – high-quality durable goods and low-quality perishable goods, we show that a higher share of second-hand–goods lovers raises the resale price of high-quality goods, encouraging new-goods lovers’ demand for high-quality goods. This crowds out low-quality perishable goods and reduces total industry output, and encourages high-quality goods producers to lower price and increase durability, which add additional benefits. Overall, as production shifts toward high-quality durable goods, environmental harm is reduced.

Abstract：In low- and middle-income country cities, poor households often reside in unattractive locations, including flood-prone areas. This can be due to poor information about flood risks or acceptance of these risks in the face of lower housing prices. Poor households are also more vulnerable to floods than richer households given the low-quality housing they occupy. Does information on flood risks help households make better location and housing choices? To what extent will these choices be revised with increased flood risks from climate change? To answer these questions, we develop a polycentric land use model with heterogeneous income groups, formal and informal housing, and flood risks. The model is calibrated to the city of Cape Town (South Africa) and simulations are run to assess the impact of flood risks on land values and income segregation within the city, distinguishing between the effects of three types of flooding (fluvial, pluvial, and coastal). Although total damages from floods are greater for rich households, they represent a larger relative share of poor households’ incomes. Better information encourages the adaptation of poor households up to a certain point, and this allows them to mitigate most of the adverse consequences from climate change. Considering the different nature of flood types is key to understanding their responses.

【参考資料】

Masaki Nakabayashi (2025) “Legislating filial obligations: Property rights and filial piety in shogunate Japan,” Journal of Asian Economics, 98, 101923.

要旨：We first provide an overview of the latest estimates of Japan’s population from the eighth century to the mid-nineteenth century and confirm that Japan experienced a sharp fall in population from the ninth to the twelfth centuries and a modest decrease in the early eighteenth century. We next review institutional changes that accompanied population growth from the fourteenth century and the population stagnation in the eighteenth century, and conclude that the current stem family system in Japan, where the duty of support is mutual between parents and children, was formed in the eighteenth century as a response to aging.

Abstract: Going beyond the New Economic Geography focus on progress in transportation cost, this paper introduces the dynamic effect of environmental technology on residential location in long-run spatial equilibrium. It develops a model with two regions in which a spatial public good (environmental quality) is degraded by externalities of differentiated private consumption goods, but degradation is abated by those of a single private environmental good. Producing the imperfectly tradable consumption goods requires both mobile workers and immobile workers, while the perfectly tradable environmental good requires only immobile workers. Mobile workers’ location choices are explained by regional disparities in environmental quality and price indexes, rather than in wages. Progress in transportation technology dynamically improves freeness of trade, but progress in environmental technology has the opposite effect. Dispersion occurs when progress in transportation technology dominates, while greater progress in abatement technology may lead to agglomeration.