Research

Urban Transport Infrastructure Design: evidence from the Parisian Petite Ceinture railroad

Abstract: This paper investigates how the construction of a circular transport system, such as the Petite Ceinture (PC), reallocates economic activity within a city. Using newly digitized data on Parisian neighbourhoods and surrounding municipalities from 1801 to 1954, I show that the PC significantly influenced the spatial distribution of firms and residents during this period. Then, I develop a dynamic quantitative spatial model with mobility friction creating households expectations to structurally estimate the impact of the PC on Paris' spatial equilibrium. I find that shutting down this circular railroad leads to a 0.54% decline in welfare, and a reallocation of 237,853 workers and 131,703 residents within the historical city center of Paris in 1896. Comparing the PC with a radial metro system, I find that the latter transport design is more efficient, but combining both infrastructures simultaneously allows for substantial welfare gains. Finally, long-differences shed light on the persistence effect of the PC even 50 years after its traffic decline.

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Presentation: GSIELM seminar (June 2023), RUSH Brownbag (November 2023), 1st Edition Junior Worshop ENS Lyon (November 2023), PPCR (December 2023), RUES PSE (March 2024), AFEPOP (April 2024), CES internal seminar (May 2024), JMA (June 2024), IEB Urban Economics Workshop (June 2024), YSI Economic History (June 2024), UEA Summer School (June 2024), CESifo Workshop (September 2024), Eureka seminar VU Amsterdam (February 2025), Junior Migration seminar (March 2025), AYEW urban econ workshop (March 2025), UEA Berlin (March 2025), Virtual Workshop on French Economic History (October 2025)

Racial Preferences and Local Public Goods

Abstract: This paper studies whether local public goods, such as natural amenities, influence the racial sorting though a market effect and an exclusion effect. First, I use a neighbourhood database of the United States over the 1880-2010 period and exploit different level in natural amenities abundance combined with changes in anti-black attitudes. Reduced-form evidence suggests the existence of both market and exclusion effects of natural amenities influencing racial sorting. Second, I use 2010 LODES data to get informations on workplace and residence employment by race at a granular level and to quantify a heterogeneous agents quantitative spatial model on 16 of the largest CBSAs. Results show the existence of strong homophily preferences both for blacks and whites, and the proximity to natural amenities increase these racial preferences. Counterfactual exercise shows that removing whole racial preferences decreases on average the racial segregation by 12.6 percentage points.

Presentation: DESIR seminar (April 2023), Doctorissimes (April 2023), PSE Interdisciplinary Workshop: Neighborhoods and Local Interactions (2023), JMA (June 2023), AFSE annual congress (June 2023)

Optimal Urban Transport Design in a Quantitative Spatial Model

This paper investigates how an urban transport infrastructure should be designed to maximize workers' welfare while taking into account general equilibrium effects. To do so, I make the bridge between seminal works in the quantitative urban model literature (Ahlfeldt et al. [2015], Heblich et al. [2020]) and a simulated annealing algorithm used by Kreindler et al. [2024]. The developed framework allows for several commuting modes, accounts for the heterogeneity of neighborhoods, and considers general equilibrium effects, as workers reallocate within the city following changes in commuting costs. I apply this framework to examine how the Parisian metro should have been planned at the beginning of the 20th century. Results provide evidence that strategic metro stations are located within the city center and are driven by locations with higher productivity. Comparative static experiments shed light on the crucial role of structural parameters and metro construction cost parameters.

Presentation: AFET conference (November 2024)

Commuting, Air Quality, and Welfare (with Pascale Champalaune)

We study the impact of both existing and planned public transport infrastructure investments on local air quality and welfare, focusing on the Paris region. We start by providing reduced-form evidence that the creation of new tramway lines in the 2010s triggered an increase in public transport usage, thus improving local air quality. We then proceed to extend the now standard quantitative urban model (QUM) with endogenous amenities and productivity, to include a) transport choice between a polluting and a non-polluting option, and b) local air pollution that affects both amenities and productivity. We calibrate the model to 2018 neighbourhood-level data for Paris, and use it to perform two main prospective counterfactual analyses: the first, on the largest public transport infrastructure Paris has built since the 1960s and which is yet to be delivered, the Grand Paris Express metro project, and the second, on smaller-scale tramway line investments. We find welfare gains of 1 to 2%, and highlight the critical role of local air pollution as a negative externality, which is reinforced by in-migration. These results suggest that standard QUMs tend to underestimate the effect of new public transport infrastructure by omitting air quality improvements.

Urban Structure and Social Unrest (with Gabriel Loumeau)

Presentation: Eureka seminar (June 2025)

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