Valuing Public Goods More Generally: The Case of Infrastructure

Abstract

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Local Public Finance Dynamics and Hurricane Shocks

“…All three of the channels discussed above-debt issuance, debt retirement and debt outstanding, and the default risk associated with new debt-are important for governments that need to rebuild infrastructure harmed by natural disasters or invest in new mitigation technologies like pumps or levies. These capital investments at a current period can ultimately affect the relative attractiveness of a city to a marginal mover in a future period and the city's ability to return to it's pre-hurricane economic growth path (Haughwout, 2002;Albouy and Farahani, 2017;Jerch, 2020).…”

Housing productivity and the social cost of land-use restrictions

“…The second is to introduce heterogeneity in location preference, which is similar to introducing moving costs. The mathematics in these two richer cases are complicated, but are described and simulated in Albouy and Farahani (2017)…”

The preservation of historic districts—is it worth it?

“…Even if there are quantity effects, this has no impact on city prices because the new marginal resident has the same willingness to pay as the old marginal resident (holding quality of life constant). In a similar model, Albouy and Farahani [2017] introduce a degree of preference heterogeneity which delivers a downward sloping demand curve at the city level. Taking an assumed value for the elasticity of population to housing costs, the model predicts that housing productivity reductions lead to larger increases in prices and smaller decreases in land values, compared with the homogeneous preferences case.…”