Sunnier, Denser and More Productive Cities

John M. Hartwick and Michael Brolley ()
Additional contact information
Michael Brolley: Queen's University

No 1190, Working Papers from Queen's University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We set out an open, monocentric city with residential structures and reflect how changes to the amenity index affect the city. On the consumption side, an amenity is represented by an exogenous boost to the utility of a resident's current commodity bundle. The city's population, land rent and footprint expand, and its density rises. We test for an amenity effect in local wages with household data for the US in 1990 and discover that city density is much stronger in explaining local premia than is the city population. We test for amenity effects in local house prices with the same data set.

Keywords: Climatic amenities; Density; Wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R14 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
Date: 2008-08
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.queensu.ca/working_papers/papers/qed_wp_1190.pdf First version 2008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qed:wpaper:1190

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Queen's University, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Babcock ().