Recent empirical work in public finance uses the housing price response to public investments to assess the efficiency of local durable public good provision. This paper investigates the theoretical foundations for this technique. In the context of a novel theoretical model developed to study...

We study the decision problems faced by a city authority (CA) who focuses on two different objectives in her attempt to attract members of the creative class to her city by providing a local public good (LPG). First, we compute the maximum tax that a creative class member is willing to pay to...

Different community organizations require varying levels of contribution and effort from, and compete for the time, effort, and resources of a heterogeneous population of potential volunteers. Many are not able to sanction free-riders in any meaningful way, and must account for people's ability...

Do voters value the quality of local public goods, such as whether pavements are clean, whether benches in the park need repair, or whether local roads are in good shape? Using almost 150,000 geo-located complaints that were posted on the complaint-platform FixMyStreet.com between 2007 and 2011,...