Subway expansion, job accessibility improvements, and home value appreciation in four global cities: Considering both local and network effects

Abstract

We explore the potential of incorporating accessibility analysis in addressing the impact of subway expansions on the real estate market. We first demonstrate that by using increases in accessibility to jobs as a continuous treatment variable, rather than adopting a binary station dummy approach, we achieve better goodness-of-fit in a quasi-experimental econometric analysis. Furthermore, accessibility measures allow the exploration of impacts beyond the local effects around new subway stations, shedding light on a network impact that has been largely overlooked to date. To increase the external validity of our findings, we apply the same analysis to the cities of Santiago (Chile), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Singapore, and Barcelona (Spain). and then explore the emergent patterns. We argue that the integration of urban economics and transportation analysis via the use of accessibility measures constitutes an innovation in the empirical approach commonly adopted in the literature. The use of such measures in causal empirical studies on transportation impacts can yield more robust and comprehensive results and capture nuanced spatial heterogeneity effects.