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.

In a two-party legislature, districts represented by the majority may receive greater funds if majority-party legislators have greater proposal power or disproportionately form coalitions with each other. Funding types received by districts may depend on their legislators' party identity when party preferences differ. Estimates from the United States, using fixed-effect and regression-discontinuity designs, indicate that states represented by members of Congress in the majority receive greater federal grants, especially in transportation, and defense spending. States represented by Republicans receive more for defense and transportation than those represented by Democrats; the latter receive more spending for education and urban development.

In the United States, workers in cities offering above‐average wages—cities with high productivity, low quality of life, or inefficient housing sectors—pay 27 percent more in federal taxes than otherwise identical workers in cities offering below‐average wages. According to simulation results, taxes lower long‐run employment levels in high‐wage areas by 13 percent and land and housing prices by 21 and 5 percent, causing locational inefficiencies costing 0.23 percent of income, or $28 billion in 2008. Employment is shifted from north to south and from urban to rural areas. Tax deductions index taxes partially to local cost of living, improving locational efficiency.

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's (2001) seminal article argues property-rights institutions powerfully affect national income, using estimated mortality rates of early European settlers to instrument capital expropriation risk. However, 36 of the 64 countries in the sample are assigned mortality rates from other countries, often based on mistaken or conflicting evidence. Also, incomparable mortality rates from populations of laborers, bishops, and soldiers—often on campaign—are combined in a manner that favors the hypothesis. When these data issues are controlled for, the relationship between mortality and expropriation risk lacks robustness, and instrumental-variable estimates become unreliable, often with infinite confidence intervals. (JEL D02, E23, F54, I12, N40, O43, P14)

We examine US and Canadian local labor markets from 1990 to 2011 using comparable household and business data. Wage levels and inequality rise with city population in both countries, albeit less in Canada. Neither country saw wage levels converge despite contrasting migration patterns from/to high-wage areas. Local labor demand shifts raise nominal wages similarly, although in Canada they attract immigrant and highly skilled workers more while raising housing costs less. Chinese import competition had a weaker negative impact on manufacturing employment in Canada. These results are consistent with Canada’s more redistributive transfer system and larger, more educated immigrant workforce.

We estimate the first cross-sectional index of transaction-based land values for every U.S. metropolitan area. The index accounts for geographic selection and incorporates novel shrinkage methods using a prior belief based on urban economic theory. Land values at the city center increase with city size, as do land-value gradients; both are highly variable across cities. Urban land values are estimated at more than two times GDP in 2006. These estimates are higher and less volatile than estimates from residual (total - structure) methods. Five urban agglomerations account for 48% of all urban land value in the United States.