Tastes, Skills, and Local Public Goods

Local Public Goods and Clubs1

Local public goods and the demand for high-income municipalities

Affluent towns often deliver high-quality public services to their residents. I estimate the willingness to pay to live in a high-income suburb, above and beyond the demand of wealthy neighbors, by measuring changes in housing prices across city–suburban borders as the income disparity between the two municipalities changes over time. I find that a $10,000 increase in town-level median income i...

Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods

We analyze the impact of trade-induced income shocks on the size of local government, and the provision of public services. Areas in the US with declining labor demand and incomes due to increasing import competition from China experience relative declines in housing prices and business activity. Since local governments are disproportionately funded through property and sales taxation, declinin...

Coalition formation with local public goods and group-size effect

Many public goods that are provided by coalitions have a group-size e¤ect. Namely, people prefer to consume a public good in a larger coalition. This paper studies local public goods games with anonymous and separable group-size e¤ect. The core is nonempty when coalition feasible sets are monotonic and players’preferences over public goods satisfy a condition called cardinal connectedness. More...

Public Health and Public Goods

It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish public health (and public health ethics) from tangentially related fields like social work. I argue that we should reclaim the more traditional conception of public health as the provision of health-related public goods. The public goods account has the advantage of establishing a relatively clear and distinctive mission for public health. It ...