Subway Network and Urban Vibrancy - MIT Center for Real Estate
Asia Real Estate Initiative

Subway Network and Urban Vibrancy

Principal Investigators: Siqi Zheng, Adriano Borges Costa (lead)
Researchers: Camila Ramos, Tabea Sonnenschein, Raj A Mehta, Liaoliao Duan, Weizeng Sun
Year: 2020 - 2021
Sponsor: Center for Real Estate
Topics: Real Estate, Infrastructure and Mobility

Access to Urban Vibrancy

How transit extensions promote vibrant urban places

  1. Subway expansion, jobs accessibility improvements and home value appreciation in four global cities: Considering both local and network effects
  2. Accessibility to Firms within the New York City Transit System
  3. Understanding Subway Vibrancy in Live-Work-Play: A Case Study from and for Santiago, Chile. 
  4. Zoning and Urban Vibrancy, a case study of São Paulo, Brazil
  5. Subway extensions triggering consumer amenities formation in a cross-cities analysis

Global Air Network and Cross-border Venture Capital Mobility

Whether the global air network can facilitate cross-border venture capital movements? 

Key Findings

  1. Based on the difference-in-differences estimate, one additional flight per day leads to an increase in VC investment between the city pair by 0.14 deals on average per year (1.08 times the mean value).
  2. The heterogeneous analysis indicates that, with more air connections, emerging industries and firms in earlier developmental stages receive more investment, and non-syndication investment increases more than syndication investment.
  3. The effect significantly increases with geographical distance: city pairs that are far away from each other experience a larger increase in VC flow after flight connections exist.
  4. Most of this increase in capital flows happen in wealthier cities. Connections between poor cities show little effect on VC flow. 

Subway Network and Urban Vibrancy