This article examines and quantifies the relationship between local amenities and prices in an equilibrium model, demonstrating the role of non-traded goods and federal taxes. I derive formulae using factor shares to infer local land rents, productivity, and the total value of amenities from...

The standard revealed-preference estimate of a city's quality of life is proportional to that city's cost-of-living relative to its wage-level. Adjusting estimates to account for federal taxes, non-housing costs, and non-labor income produces more plausible quality-of-life estimates than in the...

An important element in considering school finance policies is that households are not passive. Instead they respond to policies with a combination of modified residential choice and political choice of tax levels. The highly stylized decision models of most existing analyses, however, lead to...

We examine the welfare effects of provision of local public goods in an empirically relevant setting using a multi-community model with mobile and heterogeneous households, and with flexible housing supplies. We characterize the first-best allocation and show efficiency can be implemented with...

This chapter surveys recent literature examining the relationship between environmental amenities and urban growth. In this survey, we focus on the role of both exogenous attributes such as climate and coastal access and endogenous attributes such as local air pollution and green space. A city's...

Over the past 20 years, local and regional governments in the Los Angeles metropolitan area have invested significant resources in building rail transit infrastructure that connects major employment centers. One goal of transit infrastructure is to catalyze the development of high density,...

This paper analyzes optimal re-election bars when incumbents gain socially valuable experience in office. We develop a two-period model in which the output of a public good depends on an office-holder's effort, ability and experience. When campaigning for election to an open seat in the first...

Whereas experimental studies of common pool resource (CPR) dilemmas are frequently terminated with collapse of the resource, there is considerable evidence in real-world settings that challenges this finding. To reconcile this difference, we propose a two-stage model that links appropriation of...

This paper examines a voluntarily provided common-property resource (CPR) in settings that vary the rules used for allocating the resource to providers. Three allocation mechanisms are investigated: “allocator,” “tremble,” and “egalitarian.” The allocator mechanism, based on...

In this paper, I examine how the two dimensions of income inequality and ethnic diversity affect the formation of political coalitions and the reallocation of income. I construct a legislative bargaining model to analyze when coalitions form along the income dimension and when it forms along the...