I process satellite-generated data on terrain elevation and presence of water bodies to precisely estimate the amount of developable land in U.S. metropolitan areas. The data show that residential development is effectively curtailed by the presence of steep-sloped terrain. I also find that most areas in which housing supply is regarded as inelastic are severely land-constrained by their geography. Econometrically, supply elasticities can be well characterized as functions of both physical and regulatory constraints, which in turn are endogenous to prices and demographic growth. Geography is a key factor in the contemporaneous urban development of the United States.

The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply

Tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in American public education. Naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation. I derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area. My results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater Tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling. Little of the effect of Tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting. This finding may be explained by another finding: students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of Tiebout choice among districts.

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Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers

What happens to a state's spending when it receives an unconditional grant from the federal government? The standard theoretical analysis predicts that the increase in spending will be the same as that generated by an equivalent increase in local incomes--or roughly 5-10 percent for most states. In contrast, numerous empirical analyses have found that spending increases by much more, with some estimates near 100 percent. This result is known as the 'flypaper effect,' since the money appears to 'stick where it hits.' The authors review this evidence as well as other studies that find similar behavior in firms.

https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.9.4.217

The Flypaper Effect

Many school choice proposals would enable parents to choose among public school districts in their area, though not among private schools. Theory predicts three reactions to easier choice among public schools: increased sorting of students and parents among schools; easier choice will encourage competition among schools, forcing them into higher productivity (better student performance per input); easier choice among public schools will give parents less incentive to send their children to private schools. I examine easing choice among public schools using exogenous variation in the concentration of public school districts in metropolitan areas measured by a Herfindahl index on enrollment shares. The exogenous variation is generated by topography: I derive instruments for concentration from natural boundaries (rivers) that partially determine district size. I find evidence that easier choice leads to greater productivity. Areas with greater opportunities for choice among public schools have lower per-pupil spending, lower teacher salaries, and larger classes. The same areas have better average student performance, as measured by students' educational attainment, wages, and test scores. Performance improvements are concentrated among white non-Hispanics, males, and students who have a parent with at least a high school degree. However, student performance is not worse among Hispanics,African-Americans, females, or students who do not have a parent with a high school degree.Also, student performance improves at both ends of the educational attainment distribution and test score distribution.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/nber_w4979.pdf?abstractid=226578&mirid=2

Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers

This paper develops a framework for estimating household preferences for school and neighborhood attributes in the presence of sorting. It embeds a boundary discontinuity design in a heterogeneous residential choice model, addressing the endogeneity of school and neighborhood characteristics. The model is estimated using restricted‐access Census data from a large metropolitan area, yielding a number of new results. First, households are willing to pay less than 1 percent more in house prices—substantially lower than previous estimates—when the average performance of the local school increases by 5 percent. Second, much of the apparent willingness to pay for more educated and wealthier neighbors is explained by the correlation of these sociodemographic measures with unobserved neighborhood quality. Third, neighborhood race is not capitalized directly into housing prices; instead, the negative correlation of neighborhood percent black and housing prices is due entirely to the fact that blacks live in unobse...

/pdf/a-unified-framework-for-measuring-preferences-for-schools-ww8aspixjg.pdf

A Unified Framework for Measuring Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods

Equilibrium among local jurisdictions: toward an integrated treatment of voting and residential choice

Existence of voting and housing equilibrium in a system of communities with property taxes

Asymmetric information and agenda control: The bases of monopoly power in public spending

Community development with endogenous land use controls

: The paper presents the aggregation of heterogeneous production into a homogenous one in an economy described by a General Equilibrium model of the von Neumann type (a KMT model and final demand). The resulting aggregated model will be of the von Neumann-Leontief type. Two cases will be considered, one in which the final demand is given by a vector of parameters, and another case which will have a final demand function.

Radu Filimon

Papers

Equilibrium among local jurisdictions: toward an integrated treatment of voting and residential choice

Existence of voting and housing equilibrium in a system of communities with property taxes

Asymmetric information and agenda control: The bases of monopoly power in public spending

Community development with endogenous land use controls

Aggregation of heterogeneous goods in models of the von Neumann variety