Local Public Good Provision: Voting, Peer Effects, and Mobility / Stephen Calabrese, Dennis Epple, Thomas Romer, Holger Sieg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Calabrese, Stephen.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Epple, Dennis.

Romer, Thomas.

Sieg, Holger.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w11720.

NBER working paper series no. w11720

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Local Public Good Provision

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2005.

Summary:

Few empirical strategies have been developed that investigate public provision under majority rule while taking explicit account of the constraints implied by mobility of households. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of voting in local communities when neighborhood quality depends on peer or neighborhood effects. We develop a new empirical approach which allows us to impose all restrictions that arise from locational equilibrium models with myopic voting simultaneously on the data generating process. We can then analyze how close myopic models come in replicating the main regularities about expenditures, taxes, sorting by income and housing observed in the data. We find that a myopic voting model that incorporates peer effects fits all dimensions of the data reasonably well.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2005.