What Are Cities Worth? Land Rents, Local Productivity, and the Total Value of Amenities

David Albouy
Additional contact information
David Albouy: University of Illinois and NBER

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2016, vol. 98, issue 3, 477-487

Abstract: This paper models how to use widely available data on wages and housing costs to infer land rents, local productivity, and the total value of local amenities in the presence of federal taxes and locally produced nontraded goods. I apply the model to U.S. metropolitan areas with the aid of visually intuitive graphs. The results improve measures of productivity and feature large differences in land rents. Wage and housing cost differences across metropolitan areas are accounted for more by productivity than quality-of-life differences. Regressions using individual amenities reveal that the most productive and valuable cities are typically coastal, sunny, mild, educated, and large.

Keywords: Land rents; productivity; amenities; hedonic valuation; non-traded goods; federal taxation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H2 H4 J3 Q5 R1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (124)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00550 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:98:y:2016:i:3:p:477-487

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().