Applied Economics Seminar Series: City-center and location decisions: Barcelona over one century

The purpose of this study is to provide evidence about the spatial distribution patterns of different communities in Barcelona. We pin down our analysis on the existence of two principal centripetal points: Plaça Catalunya and the Port of Barcelona. Using data from 1902 to 2011, we build an unbalanced panel and run a first set of estimations. Then, reorganizing the original data according to the method of the US Bureau Census that uses the TIGER/Line program, we produce and balance a pseudo-panel that allows us to be more conclusive about the degree of attractiveness of the selected places in shaping population distribution. Furthermore, we develop an empirical analysis to assess the degree of segregation among the different communities taking into account the spatial dependence of features for neighbor’s status (for the period 1947-2011). Our estimations emphasize that Barcelona increasingly shows a segregation pattern based mostly on the gentrification of the high-skill workers instead of the ethnicities of the different communities for which spatial dependence plays an important role