The use of local economic development incentives within a metropolitan area has undergone less analysis than incentives that attempt to alter interregional business location decisions. This is unfortunate because other factors that influence where business resides are constant across cities in a...

Anderson and Wassmer examine the use and effectiveness of local economic development incentives within a specific region, the Detroit metropolitan area. The Detroit area serves as a good example, they say, because of the area's 20-plus year track record of its communities offering the gamut of...

This article addresses costs and utilization for mental health/substance abuse treatment, with particular emphasis on the emerging importance of self-insured coverage in the 1990s. We estimate drug abuse treatment demand and utilization with an insurance claims database from self-insured...

Dick Netzer, a leading public finance economist specializing in state and local issues and urban government, brings together in this comprehensive volume essays by top scholars connecting the property tax with land use. They explore the idea that the property tax is used as a partial substitute...

Do the ways that local governments raise own-source revenue and/or use urban growth boundaries exert distinct influences on the occurrence of retail activity outside a metropolitan area's central places? This question is addressed in this paper through a regression analysis that also accounts...

Cities in the US and Europe have chosen increasingly to offer incentives designed to attract and retain local economic development. The increased use of local incentives has occurred with little or no empirical test of their effectiveness. This paper contains a statistical method that can be...

Uses an empirical test the "New" view of property taxation. Finds that the greater the positive differential between a city's rate of property taxation and the nation's average rate, the smaller the amount of capital in the city and the smaller the per-unit market value of its property tax base;...