Papers by Patricia C. Melo
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2015
Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2010
Working Papers, 2012
This paper undertakes an empirical analysis with the aim of improving the current understanding o... more This paper undertakes an empirical analysis with the aim of improving the current understanding of the relationship between labor productivity and urban agglomeration economies across a sample of urbanized areas in the US. Agglomeration economies are represented with driving time measures of employment accessibility to establish a direct account for the link between transport and agglomeration economies. The paper investigates the presence of nonlinearities in the relationship between labor productivity and agglomeration economies, and examines the spatial decay pattern of the effects arising from this relationship. The findings indicate that there is considerable nonlinearity in the relation between productivity and transport induced agglomeration effects, implying that the estimation of country-level aggregate elasticities is likely to misrepresent the actual magnitude of any productivity gains from urban agglomeration. The results also suggest that the magnitude of the productivity-agglomeration effects decays very rapidly with time and is very strong within 20 minutes driving time. This suggests that knowledge spillover externalities are likely to be a very important Marshallian source of agglomeration economies.
Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Feb 3, 2015
Serc Discussion Papers, 2009
... for GB's Travel-to-Work Areas Patricia C. Melo * and Daniel J. Graham ** October 2009 ..... more ... for GB's Travel-to-Work Areas Patricia C. Melo * and Daniel J. Graham ** October 2009 ... The most common approach is to use long-lagged values of population or population density to instrument contemporary values of agglomeration economies (eg Ciccone and ...
Local Economy, 2015
The 'at-risk-of-poverty' rate is the most widely recognised indicator of income poverty. Its prin... more The 'at-risk-of-poverty' rate is the most widely recognised indicator of income poverty. Its principal advantage is that it is relatively straightforward to define and (given appropriate data) to calculate. National at-risk-of-poverty rates play a key role in monitoring EU2020 objectives relating to combating poverty. Regional patterns of poverty have the potential to deepen our understanding of processes of impoverishment and differentiation, and how they can be more effectively addressed by policy. Estimating regional poverty rates, and especially producing a European map, is a challenging task, given current data resources. This paper begins by placing the at-risk-of-poverty rate within the wider conceptual context relating to poverty, social exclusion and deprivation. It then provides an account of an exercise to map at-risk-of-poverty rates at NUTS 3 across 20 European countries. Together with data derived from national registers (where available) and more direct apportionment methods, coverage of most of Western Europe is achieved. The patterns revealed are described, and generalisations, which serve as pointers to Downloaded from further research on the processes responsible, are derived. The paper concludes with some reflections on the value of regional at-risk-of-poverty rates in advancing our understanding of the distribution and causes of poverty, and hence appropriate interventions to ameliorate it.
Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013
Train delay incidents have major impacts on transit service reliability and on customer satisfact... more Train delay incidents have major impacts on transit service reliability and on customer satisfaction. Operators have long focused efforts on preventing incidents from occurring. While this is important, the fact that all transit operations inevitably face some degree of delays and disruptions due to incidents means that operators must also dedicate attention to reducing the duration of incidents and reducing the time it takes to restore normal operations after incidents occur. To be able to do this it is necessary to measure the total impact of incidents on trains and on customers. This research uses data from the CoMET and Nova metro benchmarking groups to investigate the ways in which transit operators can better measure the full impacts of incidentsboth on train service and on customers -leading to a passenger-focused approach. The key benefit of a passenger-oriented approach is that it enables transit managers to better direct resources for incident response and recovery, as well as support the case for strategic investments. This research has showed that most operators only measure and report the frequency of incidents. Of the 22 metros interviewed, only two were able to provide detailed data to estimate the number of passengers affected by incidents. It is no coincidence that the only two metros able to provide detailed data are in fact two of the most reliable in the group.
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2011
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2012
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2013
The literature on land and property values demonstrates a great deal of variability in the estima... more The literature on land and property values demonstrates a great deal of variability in the estimated change in values arising from rail investments. This paper conducts a meta-analysis on empirical estimates from 23 studies (102 observations) that analysed the impact of rail on land/property value changes. Variation in the estimated impacts is calculated and discussed in relation to key dimensions of study-design characteristics. The results show that a number of factors produce significant variations in the estimates. These include the type of land use, the type of rail service, the rail system life cycle maturity, the distance to stations, the geographical location, accessibility to roads, methodological characteristics, as well as whether the impacted area is land or property. On the other hand, we observe that changes in purchase price and rent values due to rail projects are statistically similar to each other, that there is no evidence of change in values over time nor due to the location of land/property within the city, and that including property characteristics and neighbourhood type in the estimation model do not change values significantly. Publication bias tests are also performed and show that although researchers tend to report both positive and negative results, they tend to be biased towards statistically significant estimates.
Transportation Research Board …, 2012
Abstract: This paper undertakes empirical analysis of the relationship between productivity and t... more Abstract: This paper undertakes empirical analysis of the relationship between productivity and transport induced agglomeration effects within the context of a mega-City region, Bassin Parisien. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study in the French context ...
Journal of Regional Science, 2010
The productivity effects of agglomeration economies are often treated as endogenous in empirical ... more The productivity effects of agglomeration economies are often treated as endogenous in empirical work due to the potential for reverse causality. The extent to which these relationships are actually simultaneously determined, however, remains largely unobserved. This paper estimates panel data vector autoregressions for different sectors of the economy to test for bidirectional causality between productivity and both localization and urbanization economies. The aim is to address some key questions that will help to identify the extent of the endogeneity problem. Can we actually observe bidirectionality in the data? Does it feature more for some industries than for others? Is it more prevalent for localization or urbanization economies? The results show that agglomeration economies are not strictly unidirectional and that higher levels of productivity can induce growth in the scale of local urban and industrial environments. The paper discusses the difficulties that these issues pose for the estimation of agglomeration economies.
Journal of Economic Geography, 2012
ABSTRACT Abstract This paper generates new evidence for England and Wales on the importance of la... more ABSTRACT Abstract This paper generates new evidence for England and Wales on the importance of labour pooling as a source of agglomeration economies. Estimates of worker and firm productivity are obtained from longitudinal worker and firm micro-data and used to test the hypothesis that denser labour markets increase the quality of the matching between employees and employers across labour markets. Our findings provide evidence supportive of a positive relationship between the quality of the employee-employer matching and the economic size of labour markets.
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2014
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Papers by Patricia C. Melo