Superfund was established in 1980 to deal with closed and abandoned hazardous waste sites. Given the large amounts of money being spent on cleanups of Superfund sites, one might hope that the money is being spent in a cost-effective manner, but there is little evidence that the estimated...

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian research and demonstration project that attempted to "make work pay" for long-term income assistance (IA) recipients by supplementing their earnings. The long-term goal of SSP was to get lone parents permanently off IA and into the paid labour...

The recent slump notwithstanding, substantial increases in house prices in many parts of the United States have served to highlight housing affordability for moderate-income households, especially in high-cost, supply-constrained coastal cities such as Boston. In this article, we develop a new...

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a Canadian randomized trial in which the program group had 12 months to find full-time employment in order to qualify for a subsidy that roughly doubled their pre-tax earnings for the next three years. We find evidence of significant impacts of SSP on...

The United States is known for the ability of its residents to move to where the jobs are, and this has helped the nation maintain its position as the world’s top economy. Households’ decisions to move depend not only on job prospects but also on the relative cost of housing. I investigate...

There has been an increasing focus on exclusionary zoning; particularly in suburban areas, as a cause of the high house prices in many metropolitan areas in the United States. Most of the recent evidence, though, is indirect given the difficulty of isolating the direct causal impact of zoning on...

The immobility of houses means that their location affects their values. This explains the common belief that three things determine the price of a house: location, location, and location. We use this notion to develop the 3L Approach to house price determination. That is, prices are determined...

The concept of neighbourhood has been analyzed in many disciplines but there is little consensus on what constitutes a neighbourhood. The theoretical literature in housing economics suggests that neighbourhood characteristics are important in determining the value of a housing unit. Thus, to...

There has been an increased focus on zoning as a cause of high house prices in many metropolitan areas in the United States. But isolating the direct causal impact of zoning on house prices is difficult. This study overcomes the problems in the existing literature by investigating the effect of...

Petroleum from leaking underground storage tanks (LUSTs) can contaminate local soil, and surface and groundwater. In some cases this can pose health risks to the surrounding population. Focusing on single family home sales from 1996-2007 in three Maryland counties, we use a hedonic house price...