Zuccolalà, Simone (2025) Essays in Regional and Urban Economics. [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

This thesis examines how infrastructure and production networks shape economic activity across regions and urban areas. It sheds light on the interactions of local structural and infrastructural characteristics with broader national dynamics, and how these forces influence regional outcomes and development. Chapter 1 examines the role of transport infrastructure in shaping urban areas and potentially reducing congestion in city-cores. Focusing on a fairly long time-period and exploiting census data on the Italian urban areas, the analysis shows that the expansion of highways caused a shift of population and of employment from city-centers to their peripheries, by enhancing commuting possibilities. The econometric strategy combines two instrumental variable approaches: historical routes and planned highways. Chapter 2 focuses on a local production disamenity: the reliability of electricity supply. Using detailed data from the Italian electricity market regulator, the chapter documents significant territorial disparities of power outages (penalizing Southern regions), mainly driven by infrastructural gaps. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation, the chapter provides econometric evidence that electric disruptions impose significant productivity losses on firms, particularly small and technologically less advanced ones, by forcing unanticipated production halts. Chapter 3 develops a new methodology to quantify firm-level participation in the Italian automotive supply chain, using a novel dataset of business-to-business transactions. Firms in the supply chain are characterized in terms of size, productivity, investments and other characteristics. The analysis reveals substantial territorial heterogeneity: smaller regions, particularly in Central and Southern Italy, exhibit strong exposure to the automotive supply chain and are thus more vulnerable to industry-specific downturns.

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