Second-best cost–benefit analysis in monopolistic competition models of urban agglomeration

This paper examines the agglomeration benefits of a transportation improvement in a city by modeling the microstructure of urban agglomeration based on monopolistic competition of differentiated intermediate products. Properly extended to include variety distortion in addition to price distortion, Harberger’s measure of excess burden yields the agglomeration benefits. The agglomeration benefits are positive if increasing the variety is procompetitive; however, in the anticompetitive case, we cannot exclude the possibility of negative additional benefits. If there are multiple cities, the net agglomeration benefits can be negative when other cities that experience a reduction in population have larger agglomeration economies.     

Urban growth and subcenter formation: A trolley ride from the Staples Center to Disneyland and the Rose Bowl

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in decreasing returns in a monocentric city as population becomes very large. We construct a general-equilibrium model with dynamic interactions between spatial agglomeration and urban development, driven by location-dependent knowledge spillovers. Our contribution allows endogenous development of subcenters to capture benefits from knowledge spillovers and offset diminishing returns from urban congestion, thus permitting more sustained city growth.     

Activity signature functions for high-frequency data analysis

We define a new concept termed activity signature function, which is constructed from discrete observations of a continuous-time process, and derive its asymptotic properties as the sampling frequency increases. We show that the function is a useful device for estimating the activity level of the underlying process and in particular for deciding whether the process contains a continuous martingale. An application to $ /DM exchange rate over 1986–1999 indicates that a jump-diffusion model is more plausible than a pure-jump model. A second application to internet traffic at NASA servers shows that an infinite variation pure-jump model is appropriate for its modeling.     

Selling Mobility instead of Cars: New Business Strategies of Automakers and the Impact on Private Vehicle Holding

This article considers the business strategy of an automaker entering the car‐sharing market. Given the high growth of the car‐sharing industry, this could become a new business segment and simultaneously have effects on branding. The considered case is a car‐sharing system called car2go, which was launched by Daimler in 2009. An empirical analysis based on primary data (N = 1881) indicates that private vehicles are reduced as a consumer reaction. This constitutes a potential for environmental gains, as shared and consecutively used cars require less of production resources compared to a higher number of private cars being bought, driven and parked individually. Implications for public policy are that the allocation of public space to car‐sharing systems could result in a net gain of space in cities. Policy makers should also consider the dependency of car‐sharing schemes on municipal support regarding parking spaces and they should anticipate the upcoming electrification. This is the first study on a large‐scale car‐sharing system operated by an automaker using retrospective primary data. It contributes to the assessment of the current trend of car manufacturers launching car‐sharing schemes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.