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...

Amenities such as good food, attentive staff, and pleasant surroundings may play an important role in hospital demand. We use a marketing survey to measure amenities at hospitals in greater Los Angeles and analyze the choice behavior of Medicare pneumonia patients in this market. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in a hospital’s amenities raises its demand by 38.5% on average, wher...

Amenities such as good food, attentive staff, and pleasant surroundings may play an important role in hospital demand. We use a marketing survey to measure amenities at hospitals in greater Los Angeles and analyze the choice behavior of Medicare pneumonia patients in this market. We find that the mean valuation of amenities is positive and substantial. From the patient perspective, hospital qua...

A large public finance literature argues that taxable income elasticities are a sufficient statistic for the social welfare consequences of taxation. We develop calibrations that show such deadweight loss calculations are overestimates proportional to the quantitative significance of heterogeneity in amenities across job matches. In particular, the endogenous supply of amenities can substantial...

This paper examines the effects of environmental zoning policies on lakefront land development, sorting, and economic welfare in a model where agents are heterogeneous in preferences and income. Agents consume lakefront amenities that are endogenous to development and the sorting process yields lakes which differ by amenities and frontage prices. Our findings include the following: i) lakes bec...

Moles are considered pests in Britain, but this issue has been little studied. Lower welfare standards have been tolerated for moles than for most other managed wild mammal species, as use of both the controversial poison, strychnine, and unregulated traps have been permitted. Strychnine was withdrawn in 2006 and there were fears that mole populations would increase as a result. In 2007, we con...

Quality of life depends on the assortment of amenities that individuals and businesses value. Differences in the amount and mix of those amenities should affect the geographic “sorting out” of households and businesses, as well as welfare. Policy makers recognize the trend toward widening intrametropolitan disparities among and within communities and have either discussed or proposed several me...

Open space protection and the new ‘Smart Growth’ movement have to date been policy slogans lacking any formal analysis and evaluation. Evaluation of land protection policies requires a structural model for land markets with spatial delineation so that the impacts of policy on locational attributes can be described. This paper uses estimates for household preferences derived from a locational eq...

What principles vis-à-vis future generations should govern our policy choices? Tyler Cowen argues for a “Principle of Growth”: “We should make political choices so as to maximize the rate of sustainable economic growth.”1 Economic growth means the growth of inclusive gross domestic product (GDP), not just marketed goods and services, but also leisure time, household production, and environmenta...