This paper analyses how the properties of locational equilibrium models can be used to evaluate approaches for constructing price indexes for heterogeneous houses. Housing markets play a key role in locational equilibrium models. Prices for houses determine that implicit costs that households...

This paper reports the first comprehensive approach for measuring the general equilibrium willingness to pay for large changes in air quality. It is based on a well defined locational equilibrium model. The approach allows estimation of households' indirect utility function and the underlying...

This paper develops a graphical analysis and an analytical model that demonstrate how weak substitution can be used for non-market valuation. Both weak complementarity and weak substitution can be evaluated as restrictions that allow quantity or quality changes in non-market goods to be...

Understanding the spatial variation in housing prices plays a crucial role in topics ranging from the cost of living to quality-of-life indices to studies of public goods and household mobility. Yet analysts have not reached a consensus on the best source of such data, variously using...

Segregation has been a recurring social concern throughout human history. While much progress has been made to our understanding of the mechanisms driving segregation, work to date has ignored the role played by location-specific amenities. Nonetheless, policy remedies for reducing group...

The economics of environmental federalism identifies two book-end departures from the first-best, which equates marginal costs and benefits in all local jurisdictions. Local governments may respond to local conditions, but ignore inter-jurisdictional spillovers. Alternatively, central...

We re-evaluate two forms of fiscal illusion in local public finance: debt illusion and renter illusion. The Ricardian Equivalence Theorem for local governments suggests the form of finance of a public program (tax or debt finance) has no effects on substantive outcomes. For the local case, this...

We develop a general equilibrium model of the market for undergraduate higher education that captures the coexistence of public and private colleges, the large degree of quality differentiation among them, and the tuition and admission policies that emerge from their competition for students....

The goal of this paper is to analyze consumer demand in markets with large price uncertainty. We develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation. We show that consumption plans of forward looking individuals depend not only on preferences and current period prices, but also...

This study investigates whether models of forward-looking behavior explain the observed patterns of heavy drinking and smoking of men in late middle age in the Health and Retirement Study better than myopic models. We develop and estimate a sequence of nested models which differ by their degree...