Valuing Laws as Local Amenities

Valuing Laws as Local Amenities

The conventional approach to evaluating a law is to examine its effect on proximate behavior. To evaluate a new criminal law, for example, the conventional approach would look to changes in the crime rate. This paper argues instead that laws should be judged by the extent to which they raise housing prices and lower wages. The logic is that the value of a law, much like the value of a lake or a...

Chapter 15. Travel Cost Method of Valuing Environmental Amenities

National Expenditures on Local Amenities

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 ...

Valuing Rural Recreation Amenities: Hedonic Prices for Vacation Rental Houses at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland

Hedonic prices are estimated for summer and winter rentals for vacation houses located near a lake and ski-golf resort in rural western Maryland. Regressions for weekly rents are conditioned on house size, quality, and recreation features including lakefront proximity and skislope access. Percentage effects and marginal implicit prices indicate that access to recreation is reflected importantly...

The Role of Local Amenities in the National Economy

Consumers value nonmarket amenities such as climate, public goods, infrastructure, and pollution. They pay for these localized amenities indirectly, through spatial variation in housing prices and wages. In this paper, we develop a macroeconomic measure of indirect amenity expenditures that is consistent with microeconomic fundamentals of spatial equilibrium and principles of national income ac...