Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Congestion Pricing and the Spatial Redistribution of Consumer Activity: Evidence from New York City”, Qian (Alice) Li, University of California, Santa Barbara

Speaker

Qian (Alice) Li, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Qian (Alice) Li is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on applied microeconomics, with particular interests in public and environmental economics. Prior to UCSB, she completed her Master of Applied Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Bachelor’s degree in Public Finance at Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics.

Title

“Congestion Pricing and the Spatial Redistribution of Consumer Activity: Evidence from New York City”

Abstract

This paper provides the first causal evidence on how congestion pricing redistributes consumer activity across urban neighborhoods. Exploiting New York City's 2025 congestion pricing implementation as a quasi-experiment, I use monthly establishment-level restaurant foot-traffic data to estimate spatial spillover effects. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I compare visits to restaurants in Lower Manhattan's tolled Central Business District with those in major outer-borough downtowns. I find that restaurant visits in Lower Manhattan declined by approximately 15% relative to Brooklyn and 10-12% relative to Queens and the Bronx, while Staten Island showed no measurable change. These patterns align with geographic proximity and transit connectivity to the CBD. Decomposing visits by duration reveals that spillovers were concentrated in short visits (under 20 minutes) in Brooklyn, suggesting that time-sensitive, quick-service customers were most responsive to increased travel costs. Anchoring my estimates against Cook et al. (2025), who find near-zero effects on CBD transactions, I interpret my results as evidence of spatial reallocation rather than aggregate demand loss. These findings underscore that congestion pricing evaluations must account for short-run redistribution of economic activity across neighborhoods, with implications for urban policy design in cities considering similar programs.

JEL Codes: R41; R53; H23; R12

Event Details

Qian (Alice) Li will be presenting her Advancement to Candidacy paper, “Congestion Pricing and the Spatial Redistribution of Consumer Activity: Evidence from New York City”. To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.