Faculty Friday: Yuhei Miyauchi

Faculty Friday is a series highlighting members of the Initiative on Cities (IOC) Faculty Advisory Board,  by exploring their work on campus and in the city. This week, we are highlighting Yuhei Miyauchi, Assistant Professor of Economics at the College of Arts & Sciences. 

By Claudia Chiappa

Yuhei Miyauchi has always been interested in how people interact in a society. This interest, including a desire to understand what drives their actions, led him to economics. Miyauchi’s primary area of interest is spatial economics, particularly how socioeconomic activities form and shape cities. He often works with micro-data, such as data from mobile devices or from firm-level transactions, to understand how economic activity relates to geography.

“I am particularly interested in regional studies and spatial economics because spaces clearly segment the interactions of people in terms of economic and social activities,” explained Miyauchi. “There is a big agenda in my head, which is to understand how people interact in societies and how these interactions form societies in turn. Understanding the spatial dimension of society is a first step to reach this goal.”

The Effects of Social Housing on Neighborhoods

Last spring, Miyauchi received an IOC Early Stage Urban Research Award for his project in collaboration with Assistant Professor Linh Tô and Bence Bøje-Kovács, a postdoctoral researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark. Their research focuses on the effect of public housing on urban neighborhoods and aims to establish what type of impacts public housing for low-income households have on neighborhoods. To accomplish this, they will use micro-data to study the impact of public housing on a neighborhood’s economic outcomes, social outcomes, children’s outcomes, and residential mobility. Yuhei noted that they chose Denmark as a case study due to its unique system for public housing allocation, which contrasts with the system in the United States.

“One important challenge is identification of causal effects of public housing,” explained Miyauchi. “If you just compare the neighborhood characteristics of places with and without public housing for low-income households, we cannot conclude if these differences are caused by the public housings, or if public housings are constructed in certain type of neighborhoods.”

According to Miyauchi, Denmark is an ideal case study because its regulation surrounding public housing allows for separating these two forces. In Denmark, among all government-owned apartments, a third of them are allocated to low-income households. Furthermore, this allocation happens on a per-vacancy basis: every third vacant apartment is allocated for low-income households. The result is that neighbors do not know which vacant apartments will be assigned for low-income households, making it easier for researchers to study and trace changes in neighborhoods.

While the United States public housing system makes it harder to identify the causal effect, Miyauchi does not exclude the possibility of future studies on American social housing.

Connecting Economy and Space

Miyauchi has also examined firm-to-firm transactions to determine how they shape spatial organization of economic activity in the country. Because urban areas typically provide buyers and sellers more opportunities to meet, cities are thought to be economically advantaged. The aim was to establish whether there is any evidence that opportunities to meet with supplies and buyers benefit urban areas as economic activities.

For this study Miyauchi analyzed data collected from Japan, but he said he plans on expanding his research as similar data becomes available in more countries. He is currently working on a study that uses Chilean data to study how firms in Chile connect to each other, what the benefits of location and space are, and how international trade shocks affect people in different parts of the country.

Consumption Patterns in Cities

Miyauchi has also worked on research focusing on consumption behaviors within cities. By using micro-data from smartphones, tracking movements of individuals, Miyauchi wanted to understand the nature of spatial patterns of consumption within cities and how they relate to the study of economic and community behavior.

This data offers us the possibility to see not only where people live and work, but also where they travel for consumptions and social interactions. By examining individuals’ consumption travel patterns, it is possible to understand their importance for the agglomeration of economic activities in cities

“Consumption related trips are important both for the agglomeration of economic activities within a space, but also it is relevant for understanding the evaluation of transportation infrastructure within a city such as subway networks,” Miyauchi explained.

COVID-19 and Cities

Miyauchi’s study on spatial consumption patterns was conducted before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic last year. The COVID-19 pandemic has hurt countries all over the world and lockdowns enacted to stop the spread of the virus have severely limited movement within cities.

“An interesting question is: Now that it is harder to move around in cities for community purposes and consumption purposes, how would that change the shape of economic activities within cities?” asked Miyauchi.

He said these changes may come with short-term and long-term consequences for cities. In terms of short-term implications, retail stores are suffering because consumption was limited or prohibited in many cases. In terms of long-term impact, Miyauchi explained how he does not necessarily believe things will simply go back to normal, exactly as they were before. Despite the distribution of vaccines and states reopening, the future might still look different.

“If you think about these shops, for the past year we have seen lots of bankruptcies,” explained Miyauchi. “It takes time to recover these bankrupt stores. They need time to acquire customers, get qualifications, etc. We’ll have to wait longer to get to the same level of economic activity in cities.”

Another factor that will affect cities long-term are companies permanently shifting to remote work. The pandemic gave companies the opportunity to figure out how feasible and affordable working from home is, and Miyauchi noted that it is not unlikely to imagine that many will continue remote work. This will reduce people’s movements and use of transportation in cities.