TY  - JOUR
AU  - Calabrese,Stephen
AU  - Epple,Dennis
AU  - Romer,Thomas
AU  - Sieg,Holger
TI  - Local Public Good Provision: Voting, Peer Effects, and Mobility
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11720
PY  - 2005
Y2  - October 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11720
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11720.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Stephen Calabrese
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
Posner Hall, Room 243
Pittsburgh, PA  15213
Tel: 813-974-0656
Fax: 813-974-0832
E-Mail: sc45@qatar.cmu.edu

Dennis N. Epple
Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon University
Posner Hall, Room 257B
Pittsburgh, PA  15213
Tel: 412/268-1536
Fax: 412/268-7357
E-Mail: epple@cmu.edu

Thomas Romer
Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ  08544-1021
E-Mail: romer@princeton.edu

Holger Sieg
Department of Economics
University of Pennsylvania
3718 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215 898 7194
Fax: 215-573-2057
E-Mail: holgers@econ.upenn.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -