Essays in Regional Economics

Economic agents are tied to locations. To overcome distance, they face frictions in trade, mobility, information, or communication. This thesis addresses how such spatial frictions shape market adjustments in three distinct microeconomic settings. 

Chapter 1 examines a temporary service disruption in Germany's intercity high-speed railway network during a strike in 2014. Exploiting regional variation in rail service cancellations, it presents causal evidence for an increase in bus ticket sales even beyond the labour dispute. 

Chapter 2 studies the railway expansion in Denmark in the nineteenth century. The nationwide rollout of steam-powered transportation changed the economic geography of exporting. A structural model of port-and-route choice over a multimodal transport network replicated the empirically observed exporting patterns and gives further insight into the reallocation of commodity exports across ports as a driver of exporting growth and structural change. 

Chapter 4  estimates housing supply elasticities for Germany during the housing market boom period from 2012 to 2021. Using a theory-derived Bartik instrument that accounts for spatial linkages between labour and housing markets to construct local population shifts, it identifies a price response to demand that mirrors a relatively inelastic housing supply.