Locational choice is one of the fundamental exercises of consumer sovereignty. When regions (or localities within regions) specify different tax rates or supply different amounts of public goods, they distort individuals' location choices. This paper models and measures for the U.S. and New...

Households "sort" across neighborhoods according to their wealth and their preferences for public goods, social characteristics, and commuting opportunities. The aggregation of these individual choices in markets and in other institutions influences the supply of amenities and local public...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest - which we call a 'tax lottery' - can...

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...

Assessing neighborhood price indices in Los Angeles, we find that indices based on transactions prices are highly correlated with indices based on self-reported values, but the former are better correlated with public goods. Moreover, rental values have a higher correlation with public goods and...

The impact of school resources on student outcomes was first raised in the 1960s and has been controversial since then. This issue enters into the decision making on school finance in both legislatures and the courts. The historical research found little consistent or systematic relationship of...

We study experimentally the protection of property in five widely distinct countries- Austria, Mexico, Mongolia, South Korea and the United States. Our main results are that the security of property varies with experimental institutions, and that our subject pools exhibit significantly different...

This paper estimates the value of a statistical life (VSL), or the willingness to trade-off wealth and mortality risk, among 430,000 U.S. Army soldiers choosing whether to reenlist between 2002 and 2010. Using a discrete choice random utility approach and significant variation in retention...

This paper estimates the political and economic effects of the 19th century disenfranchisement of black citizens in the U.S. South. Using adjacent county-pairs that straddle state boundaries, I examine the effect of voting restrictions on political competition, public goods, and factor markets....