This paper illustrates how public goods may be incorporated into a cost-of-living index. When public goods are weak complements to a market good, quality-adjusted prices for the market good capture all the welfare information required. They are also consistent with a Laspeyres index that...

Environmental policy analyses increasingly require the evaluation of benefits from large changes in spatially differentiated public goods. Such changes are likely to induce general equilibrium effects through changes in household expenditures and local migration, yet current practice "transfers"...

Tiebout’s (1956) suggestion that people “vote with their feet” to find the community that provides their optimal bundle of taxes and public goods has played a central role in the theory of local public finance over the past 50 years. Given the central importance of Tiebout’s insights,...

We document the sensitivity of welfare estimates derived from discrete choice models to assumptions about the choice set. Such assumptions can affect welfare estimates through both the estimated parameters of the model and, conditional on the parameters, the substitution among alternatives. Our...

Environmental policy analyses increasingly require the evaluation of benefits from large changes in spatially differentiated public goods. Such changes are likely to induce general equilibrium effects through changes in household expenditures and local migration, yet current practice "transfers"...

This paper illustrates how public goods may be incorporated into a cost-of-living index. When public goods are weak complements to a market good, quality-adjusted prices for the market good capture all the welfare information required. They are also consistent with a Laspeyres index that...

This paper suggests two theoretically consistent and empirically tractable ways that a cost-ofliving index can be expanded to include the environment and other public goods. In addition, it presents an empirical illustration of such an index for Los Angeles, California, incorporating air quality...