HAMMADOU Hakim

From the observation that many public goods –such as zoos– are indivisible, OATES (1988) put forward the idea that the range of public goods should increase with localities’ size. this is the “zoo effect”. But despite this argument appears obvious, it suffers from a limited empirical literature. Therefore, the purpose of the present paper is to test this theoretical argument using data on French inter-municipalities, i.e. local governments that gather several municipalities together in order to manage some local goods. Depending on their spatial position, we split our data set into three groups: urban, suburban and rural inter-municipalities. Using spatial econometrics, estimation results provide evidence for the existence of a zoo effect in French inter-municipalities. In other terms, we find that the variety of services provided in larger inter-municipalities exceeds those in smaller communities. Moreover, the intensity of the zoo effect depends on the urban-rural gradient. It is less intense in the suburban and rural areas than in the urban communities.

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Most of the articles in the literature based on hedonic analysis focus on the private characteristics provided by accommodations. And if the area where is located the hotel is taken into account with the identification of public good, it is exclusively on the positive side. The use of Geolocalized Data Information (GIS) with a hedonic analysis permits to measure both negative and positive effects on prices. The aim of this article is to provide an indirect assessment of the detrimental impact of industrial legacy on the tourism attractiveness of a region by studying its effect on hotel rates. The hedonic method has been used to decompose hotel prices in Nord-Pas de Calais, an old industrial region in north of France, into the implicit prices of a set of attributes, both private and public, including the repellent public attributes inherited from the industrial past of that region.

We study the distribution of jobs in the Lille metropolitan area in order to identify the main business centers and characterize the urban form of this agglomeration. The aim is not only to identify the municipalities with high levels of employment, but also those that have a significant influence on the distribution of jobs. Our results confirm the polycentric structure of the Lille conurbation, and we find that the municipality of Roubaix (sometimes accompanied by Tourcoing) stands out as being highly central. On average, a distance of one kilometer from a business sub-center decreases the employment density by nearly 20%. The identification of business sub-centers is important because these employment zones influence the location decisions of economic actors, and are therefore to be taken into account in the development of urban policies. The technical difficulty consists in separating the effect of the city center (the main business center) from the effect of the multiple sub-centers. As our empirical application reveals, nonparametric approaches are more effective than parametric ones.

This thesis focuses on the factors determining the demand and supply of housing, with applications to the former Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. The first chapter provides a literature review based on the 200 or so articles published in the Journal of Housing Economics during the period 2003-2012. It highlights instructive results for both novice and experienced housing economics researchers. The second chapter provides a detailed and didactic presentation of the new "Demand for Property Values" service database to capture the richness of its contents. This chapter also provides some statistics describing the housing market in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Chapter 3 uses a hedonic analysis of housing transaction prices to explain the factors affecting their price. Apart from the "Land Value Request" service, this study uses several spatialized databases exploited via a GIS. Chapter 4 uses the results of these estimates to calculate the value of the total stock of housing and differential rent in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. These results provide keys to understanding the creation of real estate value at the scale of one of the most densely populated areas in France. They show, for example, that nearly 50% of the value of a property comes from the location alone. Chapter 5 concludes the thesis with a further development of the DiPasquale-Wheaton theoretical model with the objective of presenting the links between the different actors that make up the housing market.

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This paper proposes different policy scenarios to cut CO2 emissions caused by the urban mobility of passengers. More precisely, we compare the effects of the ‘direct tool’ of carbon tax, to a combination of ‘indirect tools’ – not originally aimed at reducing CO2 (i.e. congestion charging, parking charges and a reduction in public transport travel time) in terms of CO2 impacts through a change in the modal split. In our model, modal choices depend on individual characteristics, trip features (including the effects of policy tools), and land use at origin and destination zones. Personal “CO2 emissions budgets” resulting from the trips observed in the metropolitan area of Lille (France) in 2006 are calculated and compared to the situation related to the different policy scenarios. We find that an increase of 50% in parking charges combined with a cordon toll of €1.20 and a 10% travel time decrease in public transport services (made after recycling toll-revenues) is the winning scenario. The combined effects of all the policy scenarios are superior to their separate effects.

AbstractThe paper adds to the existing literature on the determinants of government spending in Research and Development (R&D) by considering the role of strategic interactions among countries as one of the possible competing explanations, within a spatial econometric framework. We account for several factors affecting national levels of public R&D spending, including (i) the international context – i.e. Lisbon strategy. (ii) country characteristics – level of private R&D, GDP, trade openness and the National System of Innovation. (iii) countries’ similarities in relation to (a) trade and economic size and (b) sectoral specialization. The analysis is carried out on 14 European countries. First, we find that factors traditionally affecting the level of public R&D expenditure, such as the scale of the national economy, trade openness, sectoral specialization and private R&D, significantly influence the level of public R&D in European countries between 1994 and 2006. Interestingly, the introduction of the Lisbon strategy does not seem to have affected changes in the levels of public R&D spending. Second, by using different weight matrices, we confirm the existence of strategic interactions in relation to R&D spending among European countries with similar economic, international trade and sectoral structure characteristics, though not geographically close.

AbstractIn this paper, we study the modal choice in an ex-mining area in the North of France. It is a deprived area under many regeneration strategies focusing on urban projects, such as a new public transportation infrastructure. Urban public transport accounts for 3% against the national French average of 10%. Surprisingly, this share does not proportionally change according to urban or rural context. This territory also presents particular socio-economic and land-use characteristics. In this particular territory, is there a potential for guiding transport demand management towards lower carbon mobility? If so, which strategy to implement? We estimate a mode choice model with a nested logit specification for four modes: car driver, car passenger, public transport and walking. Then, we compute demand elasticies to price and time to analyse mobility solutions. We simulate the impact of different transport policies to shift mobility behaviors towards more sustainable ones. The results show a strong inertia in the demand for car use. Only extreme mobility policies lead to a significant increase of the share of public transport. Conventional economic variables are not sufficient to increase the demand for public transport. Other tools need to be implemented. Social tariffs seem to be a relevant solution.

Most of the challenges associated to the transition towards low carbon mobility being concentrated in cities, this chapter focuses on the implementation of policy tools at the urban scale. After a conceptual overview of the economics of low carbon mobility in Sect. 2.1, we present the toolbox of the policymaker for reducing CO2 from urban mobility in Sect. 2.2, by subsequently appraising the efficiency, equity and acceptability of a sample of policy tools.

The paper adds to the existing literature on the determinants of government spending in Research and Development (R&D) by considering the role of strategic interactions among countries as one of the possible competing explanations, within a spatial econometric framework. We account for several factors affecting national levels of public R&D spending, including (i) the international context – i.e. Lisbon strategy. (ii) country characteristics – level of private R&D, GDP, trade openness and the National System of Innovation. (iii) countries’ similarities in relation to (a) trade and economic size and (b) sectoral specialization. The analysis is carried out on 14 European countries. First, we find that factors traditionally affecting the level of public R&D expenditure, such as the scale of the national economy, trade openness, sectoral specialization and private R&D, significantly influence the level of public R&D in European countries between 1994 and 2006. Interestingly, the introduction of the Lisbon strategy does not seem to have affected changes in the levels of public R&D spending. Second, by using different weight matrices, we confirm the existence of strategic interactions in relation to R&D spending among European countries with similar economic, international trade and sectoral structure characteristics, though not geographically close.

In the context of the evaluation of major transport infrastructure projects, the problems related to the choice of transport means by the user are of particular strategic importance. To date, in France, decision-makers have often used so-called tutelary values (values of time fixed a priori) when estimating the socioeconomic profitability of interurban projects. Nevertheless, in recent years, major efforts have been made to collect information on long-distance travel (structural household surveys, panels, etc.). These efforts are a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for better project evaluation. The main objective of this thesis is to measure the influence of economic factors such as monetary costs, travel time, and accessibility on the choice of a long-distance transport mode, by implementing multinomial discrete choice models on individual data. For a given user, in a given context, the probability of choosing a particular mode of transport is equal to the probability that this mode of transport provides a higher level of utility than the alternative modes of transport. The specification of the econometric models to be tested therefore depends on the form chosen for the deterministic part of the utility function and on the random part. On the basis of the results of these individual estimates, it is then up to the designer to consider the problems of aggregating these microeconomic decisions in order to implement robust passenger flow forecasts on specific geographical axes. It is therefore clear that public decision-makers are interested in having rigorous and quantifiable estimates of these values, which should enable better evaluation of infrastructure projects.