Communities in both Europe and North America are encouraging the development of cultural amenities as a strategy for improving quality of life, attracting and retaining productive workers, and promoting urban revitalization. If these policies are effective then the presence of cultural amenities should increase the local demand for housing, and the value of cultural amenities should be reflecte...

A revenue maximizing local government must obey a migration constraint when levying taxes. Using this insight, I develop simple theory of taxation that suggests natural amenities are key factor influencing tax rates. Natural confer rents to residents which governments and interest groups compete extract. Revenue rates increasing in the level amenities, moving costs, decreasing households’ reser...

Crowdedness varies widely among U.S. cities. A simple, static general equilibrium model suggests that plausible differences in metro areas’ consumption amenities can account for much of the observed variation. Under a baseline calibration, differences in amenities valued at 30 percent of average consumption expenditures suffice to support a twenty-fold difference in population density. Empirica...

This paper demonstrates that migration lowers welfare gains from new local public goods (like electricity, hospitals or schools) by congesting inelastically supplied local amenities. Our simple model shows that the structure of the market for local amenities matters for welfare: Program-induced migration will be higher and congestion externalities larger when markets for local amenities (like l...

Rent extraction by public sector workers may be limited by the ability of taxpayers to vote with their feet. But rent extraction may be higher in regions where high amenities mute the migration response. This paper develops a theoretical model that predicts such a link between public sector wage differentials and local amenities, and the predictions are tested by analyzing variation in these di...