Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 18th May 2024, 04:50:55am BST
Session Chair: Daniel Ruf, Goethe University, Germany;
Location:Jesus College, Webb Library
Breakout room
Presentations
Urban Density and Firms' Stock Returns
Memarian, Mahsa1; Vergara-Alert, Carles2
1INCAE Business School, Costa Rica; 2IESE Business School, Spain;
Discussant: Steiner, Eva (Penn State Smeal College of Business)
Firms located in metropolitan areas with higher urban development potential experience higher productivity due to the flow of ideas and innovation in these areas.
Through this productivity channel, the urban characteristics of the areas in which firms are located affect their stock returns. We use high-resolution satellite images from Google Earth to develop an exogenous measure of potential density increases (PDIs),
which captures urban development potential for the 95 most populated metropolitan
statistical areas (MSAs) in the US. This measure represents the proportion of the total
area within a one-hour drive from the center of the MSA that could rapidly increase
it's building density. We find that firms located in areas with high PDIs present lower
stock returns. On average, a 10% higher PDI for an MSA results in 0.33% lower excess
stock returns for firms located in that MSA.
Government–Directed Urban Growth, Firm Entry, and Industrial Land Prices in Chinese Cities
Brueckner, Jan K.1; Liu, Wenhua2; Xiao, Wei2; Zhang, Junfu3
1University of California-Irvine; 2Southwestern University of Finance and Economics; 3Clark University;
Discussant: Vergara-Alert, Carles (IESE Business School)
We examine the effect of a large-scale administrative reorganization in China, where counties are annexed into cities to accommodate urban growth. We present a simple model to illustrate how this annexation may affect firm entry decisions and in turn land market outcomes. Using nationwide data on land lease transactions, we find that annexation raises industrial land prices in the annexed counties by 7 percent but does not reduce land prices in neighboring counties and central cities. We show that the annexed counties experienced increases in firm entry and investment, offering a plausible mechanism for the effect on industrial land prices.
The Best Cities for Firms
Ghent, Andra1; Steiner, Eva2
1University of Utah; 2Penn State University;
Discussant: Zhang, Junfu (USA)
This study examines the spatial distribution of job growth within firms to understand how city characteristics affect firms’ opportunities. The advantage of our approach is that we control for firm fixed effects such that we can disentangle potential shared fortunes of cities and the firms that operate there. We first map how the city-specific component of labor productivity affects employment growth. We then document how the educational characteristics of the labor market, housing costs, commercial rents, population density, and city population affect the city-specific component of a firm’s labor market productivity growth.
