The Role of Local Amenities in the National EconomyOctober 25 | 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (add to my calendar)
Consumers value nonmarket amenities such as climate, public goods, infrastructure, and pollution. They pay for these localized amenities indirectly, through spatial variation in housing prices and wages. In this paper, we develop a macroeconomic measure of indirect amenity expenditures that is consistent with microeconomic fundamentals of spatial equilibrium and principles of national income accounting. We construct a county-level database of 75 amenities, match it to location choices made by 5 million households, and develop the first estimates for aggregate amenity expenditures in the United States. We find amenities accounted for 6% of personal consumption expenditures in 2000 ($422 billion).
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