Showing 1 – 4 of 4 results.
Self-published
Data and Code for: Infrastructure Costs (ICPSR 144281)
Released/updated on: 2023-03-09
Time period: 1950-01-01--1993-01-01
There is widespread consensus that US infrastructure quality has been on the decline. In response, politicians across the ideological spectrum have called for increased infrastructure spending. Although the cost of infrastructure determines how much physical output each dollar of spending yields, we know surprisingly little about these costs across time and place. We help to fill this gap by using data we digitized on the Interstate highway system—one of the nation’s most valuable infrastructure assets—to document spending per mile over the history of its construction. We make two main contributions. First, we find that real spending per mile on Interstate construction increased more than three-fold from the 1960s to the 1980s. The increase does not appear to come from states building “easy” miles first, since the increase is roughly unchanged conditional on pre-existing observable geographic cost determinants. Second, we provide suggestive evidence of the determinants of the increase in spending per mile. Increases in per-unit labor or materials prices are inconsistent with the pattern of the increase. But increases in income and housing prices explain about half of the increase in spending per mile. We find suggestive evidence that the rise of “citizen voice” in government decision-making caused increased expenditure per mile.
Self-published
Data and Code for: The Local Impact of Containerization (ICPSR 199582)
Released/updated on: 2024-07-21
Time period: 1910-01-01--2010-01-01
We investigate how containerization impacts local economic activity. Containerization is premised on a simple insight: packaging goods for waterborne trade into
a standardized container makes them cheaper to move. We use a novel cost-shifter
instrument—port depth pre-containerization—to contend with the non-random adoption of containerization by ports. Container ships sit much deeper in the water than
their predecessors, making initially deep ports cheaper to containerize. We find that
counties near containerized ports grew twice as rapidly as other coastal port counties
between 1950 and 2010 because of containerization. Gains are concentrated in areas with
initially low land values.
Self-published
Replication data for: From Today's City to Tomorrow's City: An Empirical Investigation of Urban Land Assembly (ICPSR 114595)
Released/updated on: 2019-10-13
Because cities are constrained by the boundaries of land ownership, fundamental urban modifications require land delineation changes. We evaluate whether there is enough land assembly--the joining together of two or more parcels of land--to put land to its highest value use. We hypothesize that in the absence of market frictions such as holdouts, the price of land sold for assembly should not exceed the price of land sold for other uses. Empirically, we find that to-be-assembled land in Los Angeles trades at a 15 to 40 percent premium and conclude that significant frictions prevent assembly.
Self-published
Replication data for: The Cabals of a Few or the Confusion of a Multitude: The Institutional Trade-Off between Representation and Governance (ICPSR 114753)
Released/updated on: 2019-10-13
Time period: 1960-01-01--2004-12-01
Our model illustrates how political institutions trade off between the competing goals of representation and governance, where governance is the responsiveness of an institution to a single pivotal voter. We use exogenous variation from the 30-year history of the federal Community Development Block Grant program to identify this trade-off. Cities with more representative governments—those with larger city councils—use more grant funds to supplement city revenues rather than implementing tax cuts, thereby moving policy further away from the governance ideal. In sum, more representative government is not without cost. (JEL D72, H71, R50)