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Growth and Development

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Local Environmental Quality And Inter-Jurisdictional Spillovers, John W. Hatfield, Katrina Kosec Jul 2019

Local Environmental Quality And Inter-Jurisdictional Spillovers, John W. Hatfield, Katrina Kosec

Katrina Kosec

We investigate the classic question of how the provision of a local publicly-provided good--air quality--varies with the degree of decentralization of policymaking. Exploiting exogenous variation in the natural topography of the United States to instrument for the number of local government jurisdictions in a metropolitan area, we show that areas with more jurisdictions have significantly lower air quality, and significantly higher concentrations of the toxic air pollutants most closely associated with cancer and non-cancer health risks. Moreover, we estimate that this increase in pollution lowers housing values by at least 3%. By contrast, local drinking water quality--a publicly-provided good not …

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Bridging Vs. Bonding Social Capital And The Management Of Common Pool Resources, Kathy Baylis, Yazhen Gong, Shun Wang Dec 2012

Bridging Vs. Bonding Social Capital And The Management Of Common Pool Resources, Kathy Baylis, Yazhen Gong, Shun Wang

Kathy Baylis

Social capital can facilitate community governance, but not all social capital is alike. We distinguish bonding social capital (within a village) from bridging social capital (between villages), and we compare their effects on the management of a common pool resource. We develop a theoretical model and show that bonding social capital can improve common pool resource management, while the effect of bridging social capital is mixed. We test these findings using primary data from Yunnan, China on social capital and firewood collection on communal lands. We find that bonding social capital decreases the consumption of the common pool resource, and …

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