Research
Research
Mapping Historical Socioeconomic Neighbourhood Characteristics from Local Business Composition
Abstract: City directories, which provide name, occupation and address of individuals allow us to unlock highly frequent socio-economic data at a highly local level. However, German city directories stopped publishing occupation data in the mid 1970s, thus creating a gap until digitized socio-economic data emerged in the recent decade. We develop a method that recovers these neighbourhood characteristics through non-homothetic preferences that distinguishes between the rich and poor that have different consumption profiles, which will be reflected in the local business composition. We will check historical continuity of the estimations through the actual city directory socio-economic neighbourhood characteristics as suggested by the occupation data within historical city directories between 1850 and the mid 1970s with modern samples. Furthermore, as most countries do not have city directories that provide individual level data, but they do have business directories, we recover historical neighbourhood characteristics in regions with limited historical data documentation.From Bulwarks and Bombs to Boulevards (joint with Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen, and Tristan Kohl) Latest Version
Abstract: The dense medieval German city centers experienced a second destruction around the 1960s, which led to a widespread restructuring of the intra-city transportation infrastructure towards a car-friendly city center (’autogerechten Stadt’). We estimate the effect of the change in the density of streets and boulevards within West German cities on suburbanization. To deal with endogeneity, we introduce novel instruments in existing boulevards that were build right after pre-19th century defortification of walls and bulwarks, as well as the WWII destruction. From 1966 to 1986, in line with suburbanization, we estimate that the German city population declined by around 6 to 8 percent induced by the additional boulevards due to the Flächensanierung, while we find no robust impact from a change in the street density. After this time period, we find no further impact, suggesting that the change in the boulevard intra-city transportation infrastructure had a permanent population relocation effect, but that it was temporary development. The results provide initial estimates with which to evaluate the efficacy of inter- vs intra-city street infrastructure projects, as well as the efforts of proponents of widespread demolition in favor of a car-centric city vs Jane Jacobs’ preservation efforts.What’s in a Place Name? Initial Geography and Historical Urban Development (joint with Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen, and Tristan Kohl) R&R at Journal of Economic Geography Working Paper
Abstract: Place names, or toponyms, provide insight into the initial geographical characteristics of settlements. We present a unique dataset of 3,705 German toponyms that includes the date of the first historical record mentioning of the settlement and the date it was granted city rights. We show that the frequency of geographical toponyms as well as a novel proxy for local geographical advantage lead to a city-size distribution that adheres to Zipf’s law. In addition, we use the toponymical information to identify 168 geographical characteristics and empirically examine their importance for modern urban growth. Our results show that settlements with names referring to rivers, fords, churches, hills and historical clearing activities are associated with higher levels of 1910 population compared to places without named geographical characteristics. In addition, we show that the role of some of these characteristics in explaining urban development changes over time. We find for instance that proximity to castles matters more for initial settlement growth than trade capabilities, and highlight the evolving significance of shifting from defensive geography towards water-based trade over time..Visualized toponym dataset 100AD to 2019AD: year of first mentioned record and year of city rights received. (blue=first mentioned record of the place, red=city rights received. In the top right is the time scale.)
WWII Bombing and the German City System: Back to the Synthetic Mean? (joint with Steven Brakman, Harry Garretsen, and Tristan Kohl) Global Challenges & Regional Science, March 2025, Vol. 1., 100004. Link to paper
Abstract: This paper uses the synthetic control method to construct comparison units for West-German cities. We use these as counterfactuals to assess the long-run impact following WWII on the economic activity of 53 West-German cities, and the West-German city size distribution. We extend the literature in that we do not only look for whether cities following the WWII bombing shock are mean-reverting or not, but the use of counterfactuals allows us to distinguish whether individual cities experienced a positive or negative impact as well. We overall find mean reversion of the city share for around 60-70% of cities, as well as a balanced ratio of positively to negatively impacted cities. Adjusting for non-linearities, we also reject Gibrat's law for a majority of cities.