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...

We use applied microeconomics to examine several salient problems of urban transportation: traffic congestion, air pollution, the costs of motor vehicle accidents and the future of public transportation. Throughout this chapter, we focus on analytic methods and findings that bear on current...

This chapter begins with the dimensions of the poverty problem in developing countries, and then deals with conceptual and measurement issues. It next discusses the nature, characteristics and correlates of rural and urban poverty. It looks into the issue of gender and poverty, then turns to the...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic change in the way in which people live. Fifty years ago, only a small proportion of the less developed world lived in cities, and world poverty was overwhelmingly rural. In 1950, less than one-fifth of the population of the “third world” was...

Two kinds of government intervention in the land market are considered. The first is the control of development, of which the most studied form is zoning, but we also consider the designation of conservation areas and the effects of growth controls. Growth control may raise the price of land,...

This chapter examines the hedonic analysis of housing markets. These techniques have been widely applied in studies of the demand for housing attributes and environmental amenities. The chapter discusses the theoretical foundation of hedonic analysis, the use of hedonic estimates of demand for...

This chapter examines certain of the developments in the application of economic theory and in empirical and policy analysis with respect to housing markets in general and urban housing markets in particular. The majority of the material refers to US and UK experience with some English language...

The large research literature in urban labour market analysis is reviewed, with the emphasis ranging from attempts to model aggregate simultaneous interactions between residential and workplace location to more modern econometric work researching individual labour market behaviour. The job...

This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on agglomeration economies and urban public infrastructure. Theory links the two concepts by positing that agglomeration economies exist when firms in an urban area share a public good as an input to production. One type of shareable...