Browsing by Author "Rocha, Bruno T."
Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Long-run suburbanization trends in PortugalPublication . Rocha, Bruno T.Using census data from 1960 to 2021, this graphic reveals how suburban municipalities evolved from representing less than 19% of the population in mainland Portugal to almost 39%. In particular, suburban municipalities constitute the only group of municipalities for which doubling population size occurred more often than not. At the same time, Lisbon and Porto, the central cities of the two metropolitan areas, lost 32% and 24%, respectively, of their population. The paper concludes by briefly enumerating the causes of suburbanization in Portugal that have been more discussed in the literature.
- Market potential, road accessibility, and firm births : evidence from twenty years of road investmentPublication . Carvalho, Mauricio S. de; Melo, Patrícia C.; Rocha, Bruno T.; Proença, Isabel; Silva, João de Abreu eThis paper investigates the causal effects of road accessibility, measured by market potential, on firm births in Portuguese municipalities between 1991 and 2016, a period marked by significant road improvements. We address the endogeneity of market potential by employing instrumental variables within Poisson Pseudo-maximum Likelihood estimates with fixed effects, which we refer to as “non-local time-variant historical instruments”. Our estimated elasticities for firm births range from 1.6 to 1.9 for the 1-year interval and 1.2 to 1.3 for the 5-year interval. Additionally, we find a greater positive effect on firm births when excluding the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, which is indicative evidence of a heterogeneous spatial effect. We also find that the impact of the enlarged market potential is heterogeneous across sectors. Our results are robust to changes in model specification and the usage of alternative measures of the instruments.
- Motorways, urban growth, and suburbanisation : evidence from three decades of motorway construction in PortugalPublication . Rocha, Bruno T.; Melo, Patrícia C.; Afonso, Nuno; Silva, João de Abreu ePortugal moved from having less than 200 km of motorways before joining the European Union in 1986 to having the fifth highest motorway density relative to population in the Union in 2017. This paper studies the relationship between the expansion of the Portuguese motorway network between 1981 and 2011 and the growth of population and employment in the 275 mainland municipalities of the country. We address the endogeneity of the geography of motorways using instrumental variables based on historical transport networks from 1800 and 1945. Our findings suggest that, on average, new motorways caused large increases in both population and employment. In line with existing evidence for other countries, we find that motorways contributed to suburbanisation, as the impact of motorways on population growth (but not on employment growth) is particularly strong in suburban municipalities. In addition, motorways also appear to have influenced urban agglomeration dynamics, as their effect on population growth depends positively on the municipality’s population size in 1970.
- The heterogeneous effects of motorways on urban sprawl: causal evidence from PortugalPublication . Rocha, Bruno T.; Melo, Patrícia C.; Colaço, Rui; Silva, João de Abreu e; Afonso, NunoAs urban land increased in mainland Portugal by 55.9% between 1990 and 2012 and the country developed an extensive motorway network between the 1980s and the early 2010s, we set out to investigate the effect of motorways on urban sprawl across mainland municipalities. We document the evolution of urban sprawl for these 275 municipalities across several dimensions, including the population density of urban land, its degree of fragmentation and shape irregularity (which we combine in a summary “total interface” indicator), and the differences between the central urban unit and the remaining “peripheral” urban land. Given that the spatial distribution of motorways is likely to be endogenous, we use road itineraries from the 18th century as an instrumental variable. Our results suggest that motorways contributed to the fragmentation of urban land into numerous urban patches. Also, we identify important within-municipality heterogenous effects, in that motorways did not cause the contiguous growth of the central urban unit (typically the largest urban unit in each municipality) but, conversely, appeared to contribute in a significant manner to the development of peripheral urban land. There is also some evidence that motorways contributed to an increase in the shape irregularity of urban areas. Finally, we show that motorways caused a decrease in urban population density, but only in the relatively small group of more urbanised municipalities.
- What drives the allocation of motorways? Evidence from Portugal’s fast-expanding networkPublication . Rocha, Bruno T.; Afonso, Nuno; Melo, Patrícia C.; Silva, João de Abreu eThis study investigates the factors that influenced the allocation of motorways across municipalities in mainland Portugal over the period from 1981 to 2011. Our analysis, based on Poisson Pseudo-maximum Likelihood models, suggests that population size and market potential in 1981 are important determinants of motorway density in 2011. Likewise, physical and geographical variables also help explain the spatial distribution of motorway investment, as terrain ruggedness, distance to the coast, and distance to the border with Spain are negatively associated with motorway density. In addition, we consider the influence of the proximity to historical and pre-existing transport networks on the allocation of motorways; we find that municipalities that are closer to the 1800’s itineraries, the main roads of the 1945’s National Road Plan, and 1981’s train stations appear to have higher motorway densities in 2011, but this effect is concentrated in the vast and sparsely populated area of the country that excludes what we term the highdensity Portuguese “blue banana”. Interestingly, it is also only in this low-density region that partisan alignment between the municipal and the national levels of government appears to affect the allocation of transport investment, which suggests that motorways are more of a political asset in more remote or less urbanised areas.
- What drives the allocation of motorways? Evidence from Portugal's fast-expanding networkPublication . Rocha, Bruno T.; Afonso, Nuno; Melo, Patrícia C.; Silva, João de Abreu eThis study investigates the factors that influenced the allocation of motorways across municipalities in mainland Portugal. Our analysis, based on Poisson Pseudo-maximum Likelihood models, suggests that population size and market potential in 1981 are important determinants of motorway density in 2020. Physical and geographical variables also help explain the spatial distribution of motorway investment, as terrain ruggedness and distance to the coast are negatively associated with motorway density. In addition, we consider the influence of the proximity to historical and pre-existing transport networks on the allocation of motorways; we find that municipalities that are closer to 1800's itineraries, the main roads of the 1945's National Road Plan, and 1981's train stations appear to have higher motorway densities in 2020, but this effect is concentrated in the vast and sparsely populated area of the country that excludes what we term the high-density Portuguese “blue banana”. Interestingly, it is also only in this low-density region that partisan alignment between the municipal and the national levels of government appears to affect the allocation of transport investment, which suggests that motorways are more of a political asset in more remote or less urbanised areas.