The impact of cultural amenities on inter-urban location: a discrete choice experiment on French students

Since the late 90 s, the literature on the role of culture in the development of cities has grown. A first issue of this literature is to analyse the direction of the causality between the location of people and the one of cultural activities. The second issue is to measure the non-market values produced by cultural assets in cities. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of cultural amenities on students' future interurban location choice by using the discrete choice experiment method. The latter is used to address the two issues raised in the literature by modelling a location choice between cities that differ in terms of the living environment offered, and in particular the budget allocated to cultural facilities. Our data concerns students surveyed in 2018 in the city of Angers (France). Our results highlight the existence of a willingness to pay for living after graduation in a city with a budget devoted to cultural facilities which is above the average for the medium-sized French cities. We also observe a heterogeneity of students’ preferences according to their index of current cultural awareness created using a cluster analysis. Indeed, the more culturally aware students currently are, the more they will be willing to pay to live in a city offering an increased cultural budget. Finally, we observe a difference in willingness to pay depending on the faculty in which the student is enrolled, with the lowest one for students in Sciences, Engineering and Health.