The issue of inequality or imbalance in sectional, sectoral or regional distribution of economic and social variables is connected to welfare implications of the functioning of an economy responsible for allocation of resources, and production, distribution and consumption of the material requisites of well-being. Economic development and technological progress may or may not deliver justice in...

Organizational practices are an increasingly important mechanism for retaining and motivating employees. Using a new survey tool in partnership with PayScale.com between 2014 and 2016, I first document the cross-section of job satisfaction and organizational practices in the labor market, and, secondly, recover a willingness to pay for these amenities. I show that these amenities create a time-...

Income taxes distort the relationship between wages and non-taxable amenities. When the marginal tax rate increases, amenities become more valuable as the compensating differential for low-amenity jobs is taxed away. While there is evidence that the provision of amenities responds to taxes, the literature has ignored the consequences for job characteristics which cannot fully-adjust. This paper...

"The role of location-specific amenities in human migration decisions, and subsequently regional development, is explored. A framework is developed which motivates a new assessment of existing alternative models of regional development, indicating the need for additional modeling efforts which focus upon amenities as critical elements in such analyses. The approach hinges upon the notion that...

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...

A significant fraction of GDP is generated by implicit expenditures on spatially varying nonmarket amenities such as climate, public goods, urban infrastructure, and pollution. People pay for these amenities indirectly, through spatial variation in housing prices, wages and property taxes. In this paper we construct a new database of 75 amenities, match it to location choices made by 5 million ...

In this paper, I analyze the setting of ticket prices when teams receive subsidization from the public. I model teams as entertainment providers, where entertainment is generated by selling wins and amenities. I argue that subsidization of teams generally comes from subsidizing the amenities in and surrounding the teams’ stadiums. Subsidization of the amenities lowers the marginal cost of provi...

The absence of a competitive market may enable public-sector workers to extract rents from taxpayers in the form of high pay, especially when public-sector workers are unionized. On the other hand, this rent extraction may be suppressed by the ability of taxpayers to vote with their feet, leaving jurisdictions where public-sector workers extract high rents. However, although migration of taxpay...