What Are Cities Worth? Land Rents, Local Productivity, and the Total Value of Amenities
利用工资和住房成本数据，推算出美国大都市区的土地租金、地方生产力和便利设施总价值，发现生产力差异比生活质量差异更能解释城市间的工资和住房成本差异。
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.