For centuries, cities have been modeled as geographically centered markets in which locational scarcity generates Ricardian Land Rent that in turn increases over time as cities grow. This paper first presents some empirical evidence that this is not the case: inflation-adjusted locational rent...

Using the 5% public use micro sample of the 1990 U.S. census, we find that observationally equivalent workers in the manufacturing sector earn higher wages when they are in urban labor markets that have a larger share of national or metropolitan employment in their same occupation and industry...

This paper develops an Asymmetric Nash Equilibrium model of welfare provision by states when the benefit payment is a local public good and a fixed population of welfare recipients distributes itself between states with logistic "migration" function. The model shows that state size is an...

This paper develops an Asymmetric Nash Equilibrium model of welfare provision by states when the benefit payment is a local public good and welfare recipients distribute themselves between states with a finite elasticity (through a logistic function). The model thus provides estimates of how the...

This paper examines the inflation in housing prices between 1998 and 2005 and investigates whether this run-up in prices can be explained by increases in demand fundamentals such as population, income growth, and the decline in interest rates over this period. Time series models are estimated...

This research examines housing market price efficiency across locations within a metropolitan market the hallmark of hedonic theory. Our innovation is to introduce temporal as well as spatial considerations of price efficiency. In an efficient market, the price (level) of housing must not only...