A simple city equilibrium model with an application to teleworking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a straightforward spatial city model to analyze how teleworking influences urban structure, demonstrating existence and uniqueness of equilibrium and providing numerical insights.

Contribution

It develops a simple semi-discrete city equilibrium model and extends it to include teleworking, offering new analytical and numerical tools for urban spatial analysis.

Findings

Teleworking affects city density and rent distribution.

Existence and uniqueness of equilibrium are established.

Numerical simulations illustrate structural changes due to teleworking.

Abstract

We propose a simple semi-discrete spatial model where rents, wages and the density of population in a city can be deduced from free-mobility and equilibrium conditions on the labour and residential housing markets. We prove existence and (under stronger assumptions) uniqueness of the equilibrium. We extend our model to the case where teleworking is introduced. We present numerical simulations which shed light on the effect of teleworking on the structure of the city at equilibrium.