Quantitative Spatial Models for Urban Economics

Catalog description

This course will cover quantitative spatial models (QSMs) as used in urban and real estate economics and related disciplines. We will critically explore QSMs both as tools for measurement and as economic frameworks for evaluating welfare and simulating counterfactuals of spatial economies. We will discuss approaches to QSM estimation, as well as data requirements, identifying assumptions, and the consequences thereof. The purpose of this course is to give students a broad understanding of QSMs and their common use cases, while providing a sense of the circumstances and assumptions under which these models permit credible analysis. We may explore applications of QSMs to a variety of economic topics: infrastructure, transit, congestion, land use, migration, path dependence, economic history, the geography of consumption, household economics, environmental economics, climate change.