Three Essays in Urban and Public Economics

63 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.This dissertation studies the adoption of public policies by local jurisdictions. Chapter 1 considers tax competition between jurisdictions when investors have attachment to home. With mobile capital, jurisdictions' fear of loss of capital investment, induces inefficiently low tax rates, resulting in underprovision of public goods relative to the social optimum. With each individual incurring a different cost of investing outside the home region, the capital outflow response to an increase in the tax rate is reduced compared to the no attachment case. The analysis shows that, in a symmetric equilibrium, governments choose higher tax rates (compared to the perfect capital mobility case), lessening the extent of the underprovision of public goods. In Chapters 2 and 3, urban growth controls (land use regulations adopted to restrict population growth and urban sprawl) are studied. The previous literature has shown that controls increase housing prices and divert population growth to uncontrolled cities. In Chapter 2, the possibility of intercity commuting (IC) is incorporated to a growth-control model. As controls restrict the labor supply, the wage rate may increase in the city, with land rents capitalizing the resulting wage differential. However, when this differential reaches the IC cost, workers from other cities are attracted, so that wages are kept constant. Thus, if controls are adopted in the benefit of landowners, the possibility of IC weakens the incentive for tighter controls (because the land rent gains are reduced) compared to case where IC is not possible. Finally, Chapter 3 examines the empirical relationship between growth controls and commuting between close cities. Analyzing data from a sample of California cities, the results obtained support the expected positive relationship.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD