Search Results
Journal Article
Ghettos: the changing consequences of ethnic isolation
Working Paper
Prices versus Quantities Revisited: What Do Policymakers Need to Know to Set Pigouvian Taxes and Subsidies?
What information do policymakers need to design Pigouvian taxes or subsidies? Standard logic suggests that it is sufficient to know the size of the externality and unnecessary to know about quantities. Yet this logic is incorrect if interventions have fixed costs, taxes create deadweight losses, or there are distributional concerns. We present a model in which these considerations can make it more valuable for policymakers to learn about equilibrium quantities. We apply the model to congestion pricing, which has high fixed costs, and to a proposed housing subsidy in Boston that features ...
Working Paper
Report on the Potential Impacts of Property Tax Abatement on Rental Housing Construction in Boston
Boston’s high housing costs reflect a historic failure to build enough units to satisfy demand. Interest rates and construction costs have risen recently, and the flow of new market-rate residential housing projects has slowed. To spur more construction, the City of Boston is considering various policy options. Our committee was asked by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu to assess the market impacts of one of these options: real estate tax abatements. This report presents our analysis of the likely effects on the number of units constructed and the costs to taxpayers of various tax abatement ...
Journal Article
The impact of building restrictions on housing affordability
This paper was presented at the conference "Policies to Promote Affordable Housing," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, February 7, 2002. It was part of Session 2: Affordable Housing and the Housing Market.
Journal Article
From John Lindsay to Rudy Giuliani: the decline of the local safety net?
This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 4, "Economic inequality and local public services." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors contend that the future scope of city-based redistributive policies is limited. An important way in which policymakers work to reduce inequality is by redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor, channeling income tax revenue into spending on welfare and other services. The authors suggest, ...
Journal Article
Urban colossus: why is New York America's largest city?
This article was presented at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April 2005, "Urban Dynamics in New York City." The goal of the conference was threefold: to examine the historical transformations of the engine-of-growth industries in New York and distill the main determinants of the city's historical dominance as well as the challenges to its continued success; to study the nature and evolution of immigration flows into New York; and to analyze recent trends in a range of socioeconomic outcomes, both for the general population and recent immigrants more ...
Working Paper
The rise of the skilled city
For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed effects, and tests for reverse causality. The authors also find that skilled cities are growing because they are becoming more economically productive (relative to less skilled cities), not because these cities are becoming more attractive places to live. Most surprisingly, the authors find evidence suggesting that the skills-city growth connection occurs mainly in declining areas and occurs in large ...