Quality of the Business Environment Versus Quality of Life: Do Firms and Households Like the Same Cities?
构建了商业环境质量的新指标，并与生活质量指标对比分析1977-1995年37个城市的数据，发现对企业和家庭有吸引力的城市往往不同，且劳动力规模随商业环境改善而增长。
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. 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.