Location Sorting and Endogenous Amenities : Evidence from Amsterdam

This paper shows the endogeneity of amenities plays a crucial role in determining the welfare distribution of a city's residents. We quantify this mechanism by building a dynamic model of residential choice with heterogeneous households, where consumption amenities are the equilibrium outcome of a market for non-tradables. We estimate our model using Dutch microdata and leveraging variation in Amsterdam's spatial distribution of tourists as a demand shifter, finding significant heterogeneity in residents' preferences over amenities and in the supply responses of amenities to changes in demand composition. This two-way heterogeneity dictates the degree of horizontal differentiation across neighborhoods, residential sorting, and inequality. Finally, we show the distributional effects of mass tourism depend on this heterogeneity: following rent increases due to growing tourist demand for housing, younger residents--whose amenity preferences are closest to tourists--are compensated by amenities tilting in their favor, while the losses of older residents are amplified