la dolce vita hedonic estimates of quality of life in italian cities colombo e michelangeli a and stanca l la dolce vita hedonic estimates of quality of life in italian cities regional studies this paper investigates quality of life in italian cities using the hedonic approach it analyses micro level data for housing and labour markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within four domains weather environment services and society large compensating differentials in housing markets are found whereas the effects on wages are relatively small quality of life varies substantially across space and is generally better in large and medium sized cities of the centre north services and social conditions are strongly related to overall quality of life it is also found that across cities quality of life is positively and significantly related to subjective well being

the impact of r d subsidies on r d employment composition in this paper we examine the impact of subsidies granted at national and regional levels on a set of r d employment variables and specifically we seek to identify the existence of the behavioural additionality effects of these public subsidies on firms r d human resources we begin by assessing the effects of public funds on r d private expenditures and on the number of r d employees and then focus on their impact on the composition of human resources engaged in r d as classified by occupation and level of education the data used correspond to the spanish technological innovation panel for the period 2006 2011 to control for selection bias and endogeneity a combination of non parametric matching techniques are implemented after ruling out the existence of crowding out effects our results show that r d subsidies increase the number of r d employees however no increase is found in the average level of qualification of r d staff members in subsidized firms all in all the effects of public support are heterogeneous being dependent on the source of the subsidy and the firms characteristics

distinctively different a new approach to valuing architectural amenities we propose a method to estimate the capitalized value of the architectural design quality of a neighbourhood our economic design premium is identified by spatially differentiating property prices and design quality within neighbourhoods and comparing the differences across neighbourhoods we apply our method to 47 conservation area neighbourhoods in england in which we analyse around 7900 property transactions and interview more than 500 residents we find a capitalization effect of about 25 4 38 7k associated with a one step increase on a five step scale ranging from not at all distinctive to very distinctive our results suggest that this effect is at least partially driven by an architectural externality

mobility behavior of the elderly mobility patterns of the elderly provide a particularly interesting theoretical subcase of a more general migration model which interacts individual specific traits e g health and retirement status and location specific traits e g amenities rents and wages the spatially invariant incomes pensions dividends etc of the retired are shown to lead to migration toward areas where the wage and rent compensation for amenities necessary for spatial equilibrium occurs primarily in the labor market rather than in the land market empirical evidence appears to be consistent with theoretical expectations more investigation however is clearly desirable

geography industrial organization and agglomeration this paper makes two contributions to the empirical literature on agglomeration economies first the paper uses a unique and rich database in conjunction with mapping software to measure the geographic extent of agglomerative externalities previous papers have been forced to assume that agglomeration economies are club goods that operate at a metropolitan scale second the paper tests for the existence of organizational agglomeration economies of the kind studied qualitatively by saxenian 1994 this is a potentially important source of increasing returns that previous empirical work has not considered results indicate that localization economies attenuate rapidly and that industrial organization affects the benefits of agglomeration

earnings functions when wages and prices vary by location economists generally assume implicitly that the return to schooling is invariant across local labor markets we demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic a special case that seems unlikely our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be relatively low in expensive high amenity locations our analysis of u s data provides support for this contention returns to college are especially low in such cities as san francisco and seattle our findings call into question standard empirical exercises in labor economics that treat the returns to education as a single parameter

driving to opportunity local rents wages commuting costs and sub metropolitan quality of life we examine variation in local rents wage levels commuting costs household characteristics and amenities within metropolitan areas for 2071 areas covering the united states by density and central city status we demonstrate the sensibility of estimating wage levels by workplace not residence and recover decentralized rent gradients that fall with commuting costs we construct and map a willingness to pay index which indicates the quality of life typical households receive from local amenities when households are similar mobile and informed this index varies considerably within metros and is typically high in areas that are dense suburban sunny mild safe entertaining and have elevated school funding

quality of life firm productivity and the value of amenities across canadian cities we estimate quality of life and productivity differences across canada s metropolitan areas in a hedonic general equilibrium framework these are based on the estimated willingness to pay of heterogeneous households and firms to locate in various cities which differ in their wage levels housing costs and land values using 2006 canadian census data our metropolitan quality of life estimates are somewhat consistent with popular rankings yet find canadians care more about climate and culture quality of life is highest in victoria for anglophones montreal for francophones and vancouver for allophones and lowest in more remote cities toronto is canada s most productive city vancouver is the overall most valuable city qualite de vie productivite des entreprises et la valeur des avantages dans les diverses villes canadiennes on evalue les differences entre la qualite de vie et la productivite des entreprises entre les zones metropolitaines au canada a l aide d un cadre d analyse d equilibre general hedonique ces metriques sont basees sur l estimation de la volonte de payer de menages et d entreprises heterogenes pour se localiser dans diverses villes qui different tant pour ce qui est des niveaux de salaires des couts de l habitation et des prix des terrains a l aide des donnees du recensement canadien de 2006 on construit des evaluations de la qualite de vie des diverses zones metropolitaines qui s arriment convenablement aux ordonnancements en vogue mais on decouvre que les canadiens portent une attention particuliere au climat et a la culture la qualite de vie est la plus elevee a victoria pour les anglophones a montreal pour les francophones et a vancouver pour les allophones et la plus faible pour les villes eloignees des grands centres toronto est la ville la plus productive vancouver est generalement la plus appreciee

what are cities worth land rents local productivity and the total value of amenities abstract this paper models how to use widely available data on wages and housing costs to infer land rents local productivity and the total value of local amenities in the presence of federal taxes and locally produced nontraded goods i apply the model to u s metropolitan areas with the aid of visually intuitive graphs the results improve measures of productivity and feature large differences in land rents wage and housing cost differences across metropolitan areas are accounted for more by productivity than quality of life differences regressions using individual amenities reveal that the most productive and valuable cities are typically coastal sunny mild educated and large

r d support programs in developing countries the turkish experience in this study the determinants of private r d investment are examined at the level of firms in the turkish manufacturing industry we focus our attention on the effect of public r d support programs our findings indicate that public r d support significantly and positively affects private r d investment there seems to be even an acceleration effect on firm financed r d expenditures smaller r d performers benefit more from r d support and perform more r d in addition technology transfer from abroad and domestic r d activity show up as complementary processes given the scarcity of studies on r d support in technologically weaker economies our hope is that the less developed countries can exploit these findings in constructing socially beneficial technology policies

compensating differentials in emerging labor and housing markets estimates of quality of life in russian cities abstract the purpose of this paper is to see if an equilibrium model of compensating differences for amenities can be applied to a major transition economy russia we analyze russian labor and housing markets using data from the russian longitudinal monitoring survey rlms augmented by city and regional specific characteristics from other sources our estimated wage and housing value equations suggest that workers are compensated for differences in climate environmental conditions ethnic conflicts crime rates and health conditions after controlling for worker characteristics occupation industry and economic conditions and various housing characteristics we find evidence that these compensating differentials exist even after controlling for the regional pay differences regional coefficients used by the russian government to compensate public sector workers for living in regions that are designated as less desirable quality of life as measured by a group of eleven amenities varies substantially the highest ranked cities tend to be in relatively warm areas and areas in the western european part of the country our quality of life index is positively correlated with net migration into a region suggesting workers are attracted to amenity rich locations overall we find that a model of compensating differentials with controls for disequilibrium yields useful information about compensation for location specific amenities and quality of life in this large transition economy

agglomeration spillovers and wage and housing cost gradients across the urban hierarchy abstract the tyranny of distance in terms of its effect on median earnings and housing costs is examined for rural and urban u s counties first we develop a series of distance metrics for an area s remoteness from multiple tiers of the urban hierarchy second we consider geographical access of buyers and sellers through market potential measures typical of those used in empirical studies of the new economic geography we estimate penalties of about 5 to 9 for median earnings and 12 to 17 for housing costs for area remoteness from the combined tiers of the urban hierarchy differences in market potential also influence factor prices but these effects generally are smaller than those produced by urban hierarchy distances thus it appears that empirical tests of new economic geography models need to consider sources of agglomeration spillovers beyond aggregate market potential

market failures and the additionality effects of public support to private r d theory and empirical implications we extend the theoretical basis of the empirical literature on the effects of r d subsidies by providing an estimable model of strategic interaction among subsidy applicants and public and private sector r d financiers our model incorporates fixed r d cost and a cost of external finance we derive the optimal support rule at the intensive extensive margin the costs of external funding reduce increase the optimal subsidy rate we also establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of additionality it turns out that additionality at the intensive margin is less likely with higher spillovers our results suggest that the relationship between additionality and welfare may not be straightforward

the effects of public r d subsidies on firms innovation activities the case of eastern germany this study analyzes the effects of public r d policy schemes on the innovation activities of firms in eastern germany the main question in this context is whether public funds stimulate r d activities or simply crowd out privately financed r d empirically we investigate the average causal effects of all public r d schemes in eastern germany using a nonparametric matching approach compared to the case in which no public financial means are provided it turns out that firms increase their innovation activities by about four percentage points

an application of a stated preference method to value urban amenities this is a case study analysis of how residents value the amenities of a small us city missoula montana a measure of a community s amenity values is needed in city planning so as to protect those

is public r d a complement or substitute for private r d a review of the econometric evidence is public r d spending complementary and thus additional to private r d spending or does it substitute for and tend to crowd out private r d conflicting answers are given to this question we survey the body of available econometric evidence accumulated over the past 35 years a framework for analysis of the problem is developed to help organize and summarize the findings of econometric studies based on time series and cross section data from various levels of aggregation laboratory firm industry country the findings overall are ambivalent and the existing literature as a whole is subject to the criticism that the nature of the experiment s that the investigators envisage is not adequately specified we conclude by offering suggestions for improving future empirical research on this issue

university industry collaboration and firms r d effort abstract this paper investigates the impact of publicly funded university industry collaboration on uk firms r d effort we test the hypotheses that project participation has a positive effect on firms r d expenditure per employee and on their share of r d employment the paper exploits a novel source of data made up of a set of u i projects funded by the uk engineering and physical sciences research council between 1997 and 2007 and firm level data available through the uk office for national statistics we employ propensity score matching to select an appropriate control group of untreated firms on the basis of the probability that they participate to u i partnerships we then estimate the impact of participation on firms r d effort in two points in time via ordinary least squares regression the results show a positive and significant impact on the share of r d employment two years after the end of projects this is also confirmed by a robustness check a positive effect on r d expenditure per employee is found both at the end of the project and two years later these findings are highly relevant for policy given that u i collaboration is among the most frequent policy instruments put in place by local and national policy makers to foster pre competitive research and firms r d activities

r d and subsidies at the firm level an application of parametric and semi parametric two step selection models this paper analyzes the effects of public r d subsidies on r d expenditure in the german manufacturing sector the focus is on the question whether public r d funding stimulates or crowds out private investment cross sectional data at the firm level is used by apllying parametric and semiparametric selection models it turns out that public funding increases firms r d expenditure altough the magnitude of the treatment effect depends on the assumpions imposed by the particular selection model

clusters of entrepreneurship employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size both across cities and across industries within cities but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise entrepreneurial returns thereby increasing net returns and attracting entrepreneurs a second class of theories hypothesizes that some places are endowed with a greater supply of entrepreneurship evidence on sales per worker does not support the higher returns for entrepreneurship rationale our evidence suggests that entrepreneurship is higher when fixed costs are lower and when there are more entrepreneurial people

demand substitution across us cities observable similarity and home price correlation abstract this paper studies demand substitution in the context of us cities demand substitution occurs when individuals on the margin between certain city pairs affect demand patterns in the aggregate causing certain cities to be better substitutes than others using a discrete model of city choice i derive two predictions for migration flows and test them empirically using city to city migration data from the us census i show that cities which are similar on a variety of observable measures have higher levels of gross migration flows in the steady state and higher net migration flows in response to labor demand shocks finally i propose pairwise correlation in metropolitan home prices as a price based measure of substitutability and show that it contains substantial predictive power for migration flows relative to observable similarity

urban population and amenities the neoclassical model of location we develop a neoclassical general equilibrium model to explain cross metro variation in population and density we provide new methods to estimate traded and non traded productivities and elasticities of housing and land supply using density and land area data from wage and housing cost indices the model explains half of u s density and population variation and finds that quality of life determines location choices more than trade productivity productivity and factor substitution in housing matter most but are weak in nicer areas relaxing land use regulations would increase population in the west raising both quality of life and productivity experienced by residents

long run effects of public private research joint ventures the case of the danish innovation consortia support scheme subsidized research joint ventures rjvs between public research institutions and industry have become increasingly popular in europe and the us we study the long run effects of such a support scheme that has been maintained by the danish government since 1995 to cope with identification problems we apply nearest neighbor matching and conditional difference in difference estimation methods our main findings are that i program participation effects are instant for annual patent applications and last for three years ii employment effects materialize first after one year and iii there are no statistically significant effects on value added or labor productivity we further show that these overall results are primarily driven by firms that were patent active prior to joining the rjv and that there are no statistically significant effects for large firms the insignificant results we document for large firms coupled with the fact that these type of firms are over represented in many support programs including the one considered here leads us to suggest a rethinking of support policies that often aim at large firms

fiscal sustainability in a new keynesian model recent work on optimal monetary and fiscal policy in new keynesian models suggests that it is optimal to allow steady state debt to follow a random walk in this paper we consider the nature of the time inconsistency involved in such a policy and its implication for discretionary policymaking we show that governments are tempted given inflationary expectations to utilize their monetary and fiscal instruments in the initial period to change the ultimate debt burden they need to service we demonstrate that this temptation is only eliminated if following shocks the new steady state debt is equal to the original efficient debt level even though there is no explicit debt target in the government s objective function analytically and in a series of numerical simulations we show which instrument is used to stabilize the debt depends crucially on the degree of nominal inertia and the size of the debt stock we also show that the welfare consequences of introducing debt are negligible for precommitment policies but can be significant for discretionary policy finally we assess the credibility of commitment policy by considering a quasi commitment policy which allows for different probabilities of reneging on past promises

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

new estimates of quality of life in urban areas implicit markets capture compensation for intraurban and interregional differe nces in amenities and yield differences in housing prices and wages these pecuniary differences become preference based weights in a qual ity of life index hedonic equations are estimated using microdata fr om the 1980 census and assembled county based amenity data on climati c environmental and urban conditions ranking of 253 urban counties reveals substantial variation within as well as among the 185 urba n areas the quality of life differences across counties within one s msa is almost one half of the difference between the top and bottom ranked counties in the nation copyright 1988 by american economic association

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

what drives business research and development r d intensity across organisation for economic co operation and development oecd countries this paper empirically investigates the potential determinants of business sector r d intensity using a panel of oecd countries for the period of 1975 2002 with data measured as five year averages estimates using a system gmm estimator controlling for endogeneity show a high degree of persistence in business sector r d expenditures tax incentives for r d have a significant and positive impact on business r d spending regardless of the specification and estimation techniques furthermore we find that expenditures for r d performed by universities are significantly positively related to business enterprise sector expenditures on r d indicating that public sector r d and private r d are complements direct r d subsidies and the high tech export share are significantly positively related to business sector r d intensity but these effects are only significant using the first differenced gmm estimator the static fixed effects results show that countries characterised by strong patent rights appear to hav

testing nonlinear forecastability in time series theory and evidence from the ems abstract this paper proposes a procedure based on nearest neighbour predictors for testing the existence of nonlinear forecastable dependencies in time series an empirical application to ems exchange rates illustrates the performance of the test

the relationship between federal contract r d and company r d according to recent estimates federal budget outlays for research and development rd this component will rise 28 percent and absorb 70 percent of all federal r d spending in 1984 compared to under 50 percent in 1980 since work corresponding to about one half of the dollar value of the federal r d program is generally performed by private industrial firms under contract with federal agencies the rapid increase in federal r d outlays will presumably be reflected in a similar increase in the value of commitments by industrial firms to perform government r d one of the most important economic questions posed by the large prospective increase in resources allocated to federal contract r d concerns its consequences for the economy s rate of technical progress of productivity growth in the next section i argue that the ultimate impact on productivity depends on how company decisions to finance r d are affected by the availability of federal contract r d funds i then provide a brief review and critique of previous studies of the relationship between companyand federalfinanced r d performed in industry and present new estimates which differ from existing ones with respect to both methodology and implications these estimates are consistent with the hypothesis that increases in federal r d activity tend to be associated with significant reductions in companyfinanced r d a number of studies have attempted to determine the ceteris paribus effects of company and federal r d on the rate of productivity growth p by estimating variants of the equation

housing productivity and the social cost of land use restrictions abstract we use metro level variation in land and structural input prices to test and estimate a housing cost function with differences in local housing productivity both ols and iv estimates imply that stringent regulatory and geographic restrictions substantially increase housing prices relative to land and construction input costs the typical cost share of land is one third and substitution between inputs is inelastic a disaggregated analysis of regulations finds state level restrictions are costlier than local ones and provides a regulatory cost index rci housing productivity falls with city population typical land use restrictions impose costs that appear to exceed quality of life benefits reducing welfare on net

marshall s scale economies and jacobs externality in korea the role of age size and the legal form of organisation of establishments this paper revisits the concept of agglomeration economies by estimating the effects of localisation urbanisation and local competition on labour productivity using establish ment level data in korean manufacturing industries it is found that when an establish ment locates in a more localised specialised more urbanised diversified and more competitive area its workers become more productive due to external benefits from agglomeration issues of self selection bias and omitted variable bias are addressed by instrumenting the variables measuring localisation economies and controlling for the fixed effects of establishments location and industries year however the external effects from the spatial proximity of other establishments vary across the categories of industry type age size and legal form of organisation of establishments establishments in traditional heavy manufacturing industries receive more external benefits in a less diversified area while those in transport equipment manufacturing industries enjoy the largest benefits from localisation externalities exist for establishments aged between 2 and 7 years having at least 10 workers being corporate and having multiplants or not being headquarters establishments in relatively young industries rely more on diver sified environments while establishments in relatively old industries receive greater external benefits in the same industry cluster this result supports the product life cycle location theory of duranton and puga

quality of the business environment versus quality of life do firms and households like the same cities this paper develops a new measure of the quality of business environment that complements existing measures of the quality of life an annual panel of these measures is constructed and analyzed for 37 cities from 1977 to 1995 findings indicate that many cities attractive to firms are unattractive to households and vice versa in addition the size of a city s workforce increases with improvements in the quality of the business environment in contrast cities most likely to be dominated by retirees are those that are less attractive to firms additional specifications support theoretical arguments that retirees are drawn to cities in which local attributes are capitalized into lower wages rather than higher rents

breakthrough inventions and migrating clusters of innovation abstract we investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions we identify breakthrough inventions as the top 1 of us inventions for a technology during 1975 1984 in terms of subsequent citations patenting growth is significantly higher in cities and technologies where breakthrough inventions occur after 1984 relative to peer locations that do not experience breakthrough inventions this growth differential in turn depends on the mobility of the technology s labor force which we model through the extent that technologies depend upon immigrant scientists and engineers spatial adjustments are faster for technologies that depend heavily on immigrant inventors the results qualitatively confirm the mechanism of industry migration proposed in models like duranton duranton g 2007 urban evolutions the fast the slow and the still american economic review 97 197 221

financing innovation evidence from rad grants abstract governments regularly subsidize new ventures to spur innovation this paper conducts the first large sample quasi experimental evaluation of r d subsidies i use data on ranked applicants

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

who participates in r d subsidy programs the case of spanish manufacturing firms abstract empirical evidence on the effectiveness of r d subsidies to firms has produced mixed results so far one possible explanation is that firms and project selection rules may be quite heterogeneous both across agencies and across industries leading to different outcomes in terms of the induced additional private effort here we focus on the participation stage using a sample of spanish firms we test for differences across agencies and industries our results suggest that firms in the same industry face different hurdles to participate in different agencies programs that participation patterns may reflect a combination of agency goals and that patterns differ across high tech and low tech industries

public support for innovation and the openness of firms innovation activities this study explores empirically the relationship between publicly funded schemes to support innovation and the openness of firms innovation practices using survey data from more than 5000 firms in 29 european countries we find that support policies for innovation both monetary and non monetary are related to an increase in the degree of openness of individual firms both in terms of the number of external partners with whom they collaborate and the number of open innovation activities they perform however the relationship between support and openness seems to be negatively moderated by the existence of previous innovative activity within the firm public support has more impact on less innovative firms and less influence when the firm is already innovative which could potentially indicate the existence of crowding out effects additionally our results suggest that non financial support is more strongly linked to openness than financial support for policy makers facing salient budgetary constraints this implies that institutions and government policies could potentially play a more important role than money in fostering open innovation this article contributes to the open innovation literature by tapping into the underexplored question of the role of public policies and has crucial implications for academics and policy makers

demand side vs supply side technology policies hidden treatment and new empirical evidence on the policy mix this paper provides new empirical evidence about the impact of various technological policies upon firms innovative behaviour we take into consideration the role of policies for innovative activities and we focus on their interaction while supply side policies such as r d subsidies and tax credits have been both extensively discussed in the literature and empirically investigated the analysis of innovative public procurement is a growing trend in the literature which still lacks robust empirical evidence in this paper we replicate the existing results on supply side policies surmise fresh empirical evidence on the outcome of innovative public procurement and address the issue of possible interaction among the various tools when controlling for the interaction with other policies supply side subsidies cease to be as effective as reported in previous studies and innovative public procurement seems to be more effective than other tools the preliminary evidence suggests that technology policies exert the highest impact when different policies interact

tax incentives and r d activity firm level evidence from taiwan this paper investigates the effect of tax incentives on r d activities in taiwanese manufacturing firms specifically we assess the potential r d enhancing effect on recipients of r d tax credits compared with their non recipient counterparts moreover the potential difference in the r d enhancing effect between high tech and non high tech firms is also examined utilizing a firm level panel dataset during 2001 and 2005 empirical results obtained by propensity score matching show that recipients of r d tax credits appear on average to have 93 53 higher r d expenditures and a 14 47 higher growth rate for r d expenditures than non recipients with similar characteristics the r d enhancing effect of r d tax credits is not found to be particularly relevant to high tech or non high tech firms we further employ a generalized method of moment gmm of the panel fixed model to control for the endogeneity of r d tax credits and firm heterogeneity in determining r d expenditure various estimates based on the entire sample and high tech firms are quite similar and there is a significantly r d enhancing effect of r d tax credits this result suggests that the r d preferential policy has induced more r d expenditure by firms in taiwan while the existence of the r d enhancing effect brought on by tax incentives is intuitive the estimates can provide insightful implications for the r d tax policy

innovation procurement as capability building evaluating innovation policies in eight central and eastern european countries abstract after decades of impressive growth the new member states of the european union are once again in transition but this time from imitation to innovation driven competitiveness this paper evaluates the relationship between both public funding and public procurement for innovation ppi and firm level innovation output and outcome additionality in eight central and eastern european countries matching estimates on a sample of 41 623 firms suggest that ppi has a large effect on innovation and output and the highest additionality is sometimes achieved when firms receive both financial support and innovation oriented public procurement we argue that policy makers aiming to strengthen indigenous innovation capabilities should place stronger emphasis on ppi

local amenities and life cycle migration do people move for jobs or fun abstract do households move for jobs or fun and where do they go when they move we address these questions using the 1970 2000 us census based on a panel of quality of life and business environment measures households prefer msas in warm coastal areas and non metropolitan locations while firms prefer large growing cities in addition cities with improving business environments acquire increasing shares of workers especially workers with high levels of human capital cities with improving consumer amenities become relatively more populated by retirees further analysis of individual level migration decisions indicates that regardless of marital status young highly educated households tend to move towards places with higher quality business environments this tendency is especially pronounced among highly educated couples who are more subject to job market co location problems in contrast regardless of education couples near retirement tend to move away from places with favorable business environments and towards places with highly valued consumer amenities these patterns help explain why areas unattractive to both households and business have struggled as with upstate new york while the sun belt and other regions are thriving