Measuring Preferences for Local Public Goods

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Public goods provided by local governments shape many fundamental aspects of life, such as access to education, safety, and neighborhood quality. But how much households value publicly provided goods compared to neighborhood amenities remains unclear. This paper uses a sample of 1.5 million houses in thousands of neighborhoods that straddle local government boundaries to isolate local government valuation. We find that households value access to specific local governments even when comparing homes on opposite sides of the same street but in different governments, suggesting an important role for excludable local public goods. White and Black households show little differential valuation, while Hispanic and especially Asian households exhibit lower and higher valuation, respectively. Local government valuation is mediated through the quality of schooling, free-riding on high-property tax payers, and the quality of peers with whom public goods are consumed.

Type of resource	text
Date created	September 9, 2021

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/zb063tf4790
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/zb063tf4790

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).

Preferred citation: Schonholzer, D. (2022). Measuring Preferences for Local Public Goods. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/zb063tf4790

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