Chicken or egg? The PVAR econometrics of transportation

To analyse the mutually dependent relationship between local economic performance, demand for and supply of transport services, we employ the structural panel VAR method that is popular in the macroeconomic literature, but has not previously been applied to the modelling of the within-city dynamics of transportation. We focus on a within-city panel of Berlin, Germany during the heyday of the construction of its dense public transit network (1890–1914). Our results suggest that economic outcomes and a supply of transport infrastructure mutually determine each other. We find a short-run (long-run) elasticity of property prices with respect to transport supply of 2% (8.5%). Both transport demand and supply seem to be driven more by firms than by residents.

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