THE SOCIAL BENEFITS OF URBAN CULTURAL AMENITIES*

ABSTRACT. This paper uses a two-stage hedonic wage approach to derive the benefits from improvement of five cultural amenities. It is argued that the hedonic approach permits valuation of both private and local public aspects of cultural goods since access to the amenity is an essential input in the production of the final service flow. Empirical estimates of willingness to pay suggest price and income elasticities are approximately unity. Lower-bound estimates of marginal benefits for a representative city range from $0.85 million for an additional theater to $57.9 million for an additional zoo facility.     

TRANSPORTATION RATES AND LOCATION OF THE FIRM: A COMPARATIVE STATIC ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of the structure of transportation rates in the Weber-Moses triangle model. It shows that, in Zeigler's analysis, the appearance of the price elasticities of demand for inputs actually vanish by a simple application of the envelope theorem. Applying comparative statics analysis, we show when transportation rates are a function of quantity and distance, the assumptions that the production function is homogeneous of degree one and the transportation rates elasticities with respect to quantity and distance are constant are not sufficient to insure that the optimum location is independent of the level of output. This result is significantly different from that obtained by either Miller and Jensen or Zeigler.     

The Spatial Structuring of Central Places

The spatial structuring of “classical” central place systems is the primary concern of this research. Emphasizing the development of such systems from basic spatial relations between centers and hinterland locations (rather than as a result of an underlying geometry of regions), this paper takes an optimization approach to the siting of central places in a single-good system. The objective function is shown to be one that maximizes both market coverage of demand and market overlap. Access to this objective is given through the natural slack covering model.     

Evaluating Tobler's Migration Vector Fields

In the past decade Tobler has provided an innovative cartographic presentation of migration flows. The central theme of this research has been to utilize detailed migration data to reveal the underlying structures of migration flows. Even though the analyses are not explanatory models of migration exchanges, the application of these techniques to migration flows over time and across different spatial scales provides a visual generalization of often extremely complex flows. The application of his techniques at two spatial scales for the Netherlands illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of migration force fields for the analysis of migration.     

COMPACTNESS AND ELECTORAL BOUNDARY ADJUSTMENT: AN ASSESSMENT OF ALTERNATIVE MEASURES

Spatial compactness has been proposed as a suitable criterion for assessing whether electoral boundaries reflect partisan interests. Although several different measures of spatial compactness have been developed, only limited efforts have been made to compare and evaluate them in the context of electoral redistricting. This paper assesses alternative spatial compactness measures and applies conceptually appealing measures to the provincial ridings proposed by British Columbia's Royal Commission on Electoral Boundaries (1988).