Yanos Zylberberg

Pollution and the Organisation of Activities in Cities

In a CESifo Working Paper (6166) entitled "East Side Story: Historical Pollution and Neighbourhood Sorting", Yanos Zylberberg, and his co-authors Stephan Heblich and Alex Trew, examine a puzzling stylised fact: The east sides of formerly industrial cities such as London, New York and Paris have historically been the poorest. They show that the explanation lies in the air pollution emitted by the coal-burning factories of the industrial era. They first reconstruct atmospheric pollution and neighbourhood composition at a precise geographic level across English cities using a combination of historic ordinance survey maps and individual census records around the year 1881. Then they document how pollution generated neighbourhood sorting during the nineteenth century, and how such sorting remained persistent even after the closure of these coal-burning industries in cities around 1950–1960.

Mr Zylberberg's research agenda while at CESifo will consist in studying the impact of mass rural-urban migration on the spatial organisation of cities in China (1990–2015). Over the past decades, China has seen a rapid transformation of its production from an agrarian and rural economy to a modern and urban one. During this period, about 250 million rural workers have fled to both existing and newly-created urban centres. While this shift in labour supply may benefit the urban sector, it poses a serious threat to the organisation of economic activities and amenities in cities (e.g., urban sprawl, residential segregation, transport congestion and pollution). The research will exploit large shocks in origin rural districts to study how the associated immigration to urban centres affects the spatial provision of amenities and the organisation of production in receiving cities.

Yanos Zylberberg is Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in Economics at the University of Bristol. He was a post-doctoral researcher at CREI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He holds a Master's degree and a PhD from the Paris School of Economics.