TY - JOUR
T1 - What Are Cities Worth? Land Rents, Local Productivity, and the Total Value of Amenities
AU - Albouy, David
N1 - Funding Information:
I thank David Agrawal, Bob Barsky, John Bound, Gabriel Ehrlich, Rob Gillezeau, Michael Greenstone, Andrew Hanson, Andrew Haughwout, Jim Hines, Fabian Lange, Anne Mandich, Peter Mieskowski, John Quigley, Jordan Rappaport, Stuart Rosenthal, Michael Rossi, Nathan Seegert, Bryan Stuart, and the participants of seminars at the Federal Reserve Banks of Kansas City and New York, Aarhus, Essex, LSE, Rice, Texas A & M, UC Berkeley (Haas), UI-Chicago, Maryland, Michigan, Virginia, and Hebrew. Kevin A. Crosby and Bert Lue provided excellent and diligent research assistance. The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan and the National Science Foundation (grant SES-0922340) provided valuable support. Any mistakes are my own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Copyright:
Copyright 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/7/1
Y1 - 2016/7/1
N2 - This paper models how to use widely available data on wages and housing costs to infer land rents, local productivity, and the total value of local amenities in the presence of federal taxes and locally produced nontraded goods. I apply the model to U.S. metropolitan areas with the aid of visually intuitive graphs. The results improve measures of productivity and feature large differences in land rents. Wage and housing cost differences across metropolitan areas are accounted for more by productivity than quality-of-life differences. Regressions using individual amenities reveal that the most productive and valuable cities are typically coastal, sunny, mild, educated, and large.
AB - This paper models how to use widely available data on wages and housing costs to infer land rents, local productivity, and the total value of local amenities in the presence of federal taxes and locally produced nontraded goods. I apply the model to U.S. metropolitan areas with the aid of visually intuitive graphs. The results improve measures of productivity and feature large differences in land rents. Wage and housing cost differences across metropolitan areas are accounted for more by productivity than quality-of-life differences. Regressions using individual amenities reveal that the most productive and valuable cities are typically coastal, sunny, mild, educated, and large.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84978371856&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.3386/w14981
DO - 10.3386/w14981
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84978371856
SN - 0034-6535
VL - 98
SP - 477
EP - 487
JO - Review of Economics and Statistics
JF - Review of Economics and Statistics
IS - 3
ER -