This paper examines the effects of a generous, spatially targeted economic development policy (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on local neighborhood characteristics and on the neighborhood quality of life, taking into account the interactions amongst the policy, changes in neighborhood...

Higher nominal wages in urban areas are well-documented phenomena which imply higher productivity of urban workers. Yankow and Wheeler show that these gains come through a variety of sources including static agglomeration economies and dynamic learning and matching efficiencies in cities. Yet,...

Much has been written identifying property price effects of historic preservation policies. Little attention has been paid to the possible policy endogeneity in hedonic price models. This paper outlines a general case of land use regulation in the presence of externalities and then demonstrates...

Impact fees are one-time fees imposed by municipalities upon builders when houses are first built. Proponents of impact fees claim that they compensate for marginal costs, and that the fees are absorbed by developers. The first part of this paper discusses several of the legal challenges to...