Public finance seminar for phd students: -- The property tax -- Public production functions -- Program evaluation -- Public cost functions -- Cost indexes and pupil weights -- School district consolidation -- The demand for local public services -- State aid to local governments -- Bidding and...

This paper explores (dis-)economies of scale in property value assessment via cooperative agreements among small tax assessing jurisdictions without consolidation. New York State incentivizes small neighboring towns to unify their assessment function while maintaining respective tax authority;...

The relationship between the level of income and the population of an urban area is a familiar concern in urban economics. Existing models of this relationship assume a homogeneous labour force and hence no inequality in the size distribution of income within an urban area. In this paper we...

Hedonic regressions with house value as the dependent variable are widely used to study public services and neighborhood amenities. This paper builds on the theory of household bidding and sorting across communities to derive bid-function envelopes, which provide a form for these regressions....

This chapter reviews the literature on the boundary between urban economics and local public finance, defined as research that considers both a housing market and the market for local public services. The first part of the chapter considers positive theories. This part presents the consensus...