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Working Paper
The New England-China relationship in 2005
This essay provides an overview of current trade patterns between New England and China. It was prepared for a symposium sponsored by The Boston Athenaeum comparing New England?s present-day trade with China to the region?s prominence in the U.S.-China trade of the 19th century. The essay concludes that a special trade relationship between New England and China does not exist at the present time. Although New England?s exports to China are growing rapidly, they are not growing markedly faster than exports from the rest of the country, and China does not account for an unusually large fraction ...
Working Paper
The lengthening of childhood
Forty years ago, 96 percent of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84 percent. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes in school entry laws; the rest reflects "academic redshirting," the practice of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible. We show that the ...
Working Paper
Unaffordable housing and local employment growth
High housing prices have caused concerns among policy makers as well as the public in many U.S. regions. There is a general belief that unaffordable housing could drive businesses away and thus impede job growth. However, there has been little empirical evidence that supports this view. In this paper, we clarify how housing affordability is linked to employment growth and why unaffordable housing could negatively affect employment growth. We empirically measure this effect using data on California municipalities and U.S. metropolitan areas and counties. It is argued that for various reasons a ...
Working Paper
The impact of wetlands rules on the prices of regulated and proximate houses: a case study
Federal, state and local wetlands protection laws that restrict landowners' ability to develop their properties in certain ways could decrease the value of the affected properties. However, the regulations could also give benefits to nearby neighbors, who no longer need to worry about increased development in their area. Given that some properties may decline in value while others increase, the impact on individual properties must be determined empirically. ; This study uses a data set from Newton, Massachusetts, to examine the impact of wetlands laws on the regulated properties as well as on ...
Working Paper
The dynamic between municipal revenue sources and the state-local relationship in New England
This working paper was written for the New England Public Policy Center?s third annual conference: ?The Dynamic between Municipal Revenue Sources and the State-Local Relationship in New England?. It relies on data from the U.S. Census to examine the dynamic between municipal revenues and the state-local relationship in New England. The analysis shows that?compared with the nation as a whole?municipal governments in New England rely very heavily on the property tax. They also have limited or no access to local-option revenues such as sales taxes, and they rely less on fees and other nontax ...
Working Paper
Spatial competition and cross-border shopping
This paper investigates competition between jurisdictions in the context of cross-border shopping for state lottery tickets. We first develop a simple theoretical model in which consumers choose between state lotteries and face a trade-off between travel costs and the price of a fair gamble, which is declining in the size of the jackpot and the odds of winning. Given this trade-off, the model predicts that per-resident sales should be more responsive to prices in small states with densely populated borders, relative to large states with sparsely populated borders. Our empirical analysis ...
Working Paper
The challenge of energy policy in New England
New England needs a reliable supply of energy for its day-to-day functioning and its economic growth. The right mix of fuels and technologies must be in the right place at the right time, all the time. Because of the long lead times in building energy infrastructure, ensuring system reliability requires making decisions, investments, and policy today that will allow the region to meet expected demand many years from now, while at the same time buffering the region from the impact of unexpected short-term changes in energy markets. And this, in turn, requires both well-functioning markets and ...
Working Paper
Designing formulas for distributing reductions in state aid
Local governments depend on state aid to provide residents and businesses with vital public services, such as education, police and fire protection, and safe public roads. However, in response to the recent fiscal crisis, many states are quickly and deeply cutting local aid. The Congressional Budget Office reported that 22 states reduced aid to local governments in FY 2010, and 20 states have proposed additional cuts in FY 2011. ; States tend to cut aid either on an ad hoc basis or across the board, with every community receiving the same percent aid cut. This paper proposes a new, more ...
Working Paper
The lack of affordable housing in New England: how big a problem?: why is it growing?: what are we doing about it?
Although housing costs in greater Boston and elsewhere around the region have leveled off, affordable housing is still high on the public policy agenda in every New England state. A growing chorus of employers and policymakers are warning that the region's high cost of housing is now undermining its ability to attract and retain workers and businesses. This paper presents a thorough, region-wide analysis of the housing affordability problem in New England. We construct three affordability indicators to examine differences in the cost of housing across socioeconomic, demographic, and ...
Working Paper
Measuring fiscal disparities across the U. S. states: a representative revenue system/representative expenditure system approach, fiscal year 2002
States and their local governments vary both in their needs to provide basic public services and in their abilities to raise revenues to pay for those services. A joint study by the Tax Policy Center and the New England Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston uses the Representative Revenue System (RRS) and the Representative Expenditure System (RES) frameworks to quantify these disparities across states by comparing each state?s revenue capacity, revenue effort, and necessary expenditures to the average capacity, effort, and need in states across the country for fiscal year 2002. ...