With the renewed interest in cities as economic centers comes a need to understand how local public services and local taxes are likely to affect city economic performance. This paper provides an equilibrium model of an open city economy with mobile firms and resident workers. Given household...

We provide estimates of the impact and long-run elasticities of tax base with respect to tax rates for four large U.S. cities: Houston (property taxation), Minneapolis (property taxation), New York City (property, general sales, and income taxation), and Philadelphia (property, gross receipts,...

Previous arguments for suburb-to-city fiscal assistance have stressed spillovers from city services to suburban residents or the fact that suburban residents (should?) care about their city's poor. We explore the validity of a third possible argument: Suburban residents - even those who never...