Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2010, City and Regional Planning

This dissertation presents five essays dealing with the utilization and abandonment of a city's assets, in particular two key assets: agglomeration economies and legacy capital. The first essay traces out the causes and effects of agglomeration economies by disentangling economies of agglomeration. It disentangles amenity and productivity effects of agglomeration; it decomposes aggregate scale effects into agglomeration factors of interest to policy makers; and it estimates own effects and spillovers to neighbors. It proposes a spatial simultaneous equations model in a spatial equilibrium framework with three agents – worker consumers and producers of traded goods and housing. Results for Ohio counties estimate economies resulting from population size, agglomeration causes, and public service quality and cost on each of the three agents in own and neighboring counties. The second essay theoretically models the abandonment and reuse of legacy capital in the process of industrial restructuring. It aims to identify the conditions for abandonment and the factors that determine the length of abandonment. The model is based on investment theory and game theory. It shows that abandonment is impacted by conversion costs of legacy capital, the rate of growth of industries involved in the restructuring, and policy variables such as tax rate. The third essay empirically verifies the theoretical model developed in the second essay, using data of industrial and commercial properties (ICPs) in the Cleveland city-region in Ohio. It shows that in declining industries or regions, ICPs experience tax delinquency of longer duration and are more likely to be abandoned than elsewhere. Also, ICPs with higher conversion costs are more likely to experience longer spells of tax delinquency and are more likely to be abandoned than others. Abandoned ICPs are spatially concentrated either as a result of negative spillovers or shared history. The fourth essay theoretically models the extern (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Burkhard von Rabenau (Committee Chair); Jean-Michel Guldmann (Committee Member); Philip Viton (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Urban Planning