Determinants of Residential Location Choice: How Important Are Local Public Goods in Attracting Homeowners to Central City Locations?*

Abstract. A hybrid conditional logit choice model is estimated using data on the characteristics and destination of homeowners who engaged in intrametropolitan moves among 17 school districts within the Columbus, Ohio area in 1995. The model is used to test the relative influence of local fiscal and public goods versus household‐level characteristics in determining household location choices across central city and suburban school districts. Results provide evidence of both a “natural evolution” of households to the suburbs, due to job location, residential filtering, and household income and lifecycle effects, and “flight from blight,” due to lower school quality, higher crime levels, and lower average income levels in the city. In comparing the magnitudes of these variables, we find that school quality exerts the strongest influence: a 1‐percent increase in the school quality of the city district increases the probability of choosing a city residence by 3.7 percent. In contrast, the effects of household income and other individual characteristics are relatively modest. The findings provide support for a “flight from blight” suburbanization process that is dominated by differences in neighborhood quality between the city and suburbs. An implication is that investments that promote central city development and reduce suburbanization are justified on efficiency grounds if negative externalities are generated by increased concentration of poverty, crime, and low school quality.     

Book reviews

Tsuyoshi Kato. Matriliny and migration: evolving Minangkabau traditions in Indonesia. 267 pp. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982. $28.10.

E. M. Beekman (tr.). The poison tree. Selected writings of Rimphius on the natural history of the Indies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. (Library of the Indies.) $20.

Nigel Phillips. Sijobang: sung narrative poetry of West Sumatra, xi, 255 pp. Cambridge, etc: Cambridge University Press, 1981. (Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture, I.) £22.50.

Bernd Nothofer. Dialektatlas von Zentral‐Java. vi, 32 pp., 337 maps. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981. DM 64.

Marlene van Doom and cthers (ed.). Improving access to Indonesian collections in the Netherlands: contributions to a survey of Dutch library and documentation activities in the field of Indonesian studies. Edited by Mavlene van Doorn, Irene Farjon, Ciska Pattipilohy, Gerard J Telkamp. [iv], 78 pp. Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion (University of Leiden) in cooperation with the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen for the Contactgroep Documentatie Indonesie, 1981. (Intercon‐tinenta, No. 2.)

Leo Suryadinata. Eminent Indonesian Chinese: biographical sketches. Revised edition. 218 pp. Singapore: Gunung Agung, 1981.

A. Ed. Schmidgall‐Tellings and Alan M Stevens. Contemporary Indonesian‐English dictionary: a supplement to the standard Indonesian dictionaries with particular concentration on new words₃ expressions, and meanings, xv, 388 pp. Athens, Ohio, etc: Ohio University Press, [^C1981].

Peter B R Carey (tr.). Babad Dipanagara. An account of the outbreak of the Java War (1825–30). “ The Surdkarta court version of the Babad Dipanagara with translations into English and Indonesian Malay, lxxiii, 344 pp., front., 4 plates, map. Kuala Lumpur: printed for the Council of the M.B.R.A.S. by Art Printing Works Sdn. Bhd., 1981. (Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Monograph No. 9.) M$55.     

A GIS method for assessing the zone of human-environmental impact around archaeological sites: a test case from the Late Neolithic of Wadi Ziqlâb,Jordan

Assessing the impact of prehistoric sites on their local environment is difficult to accomplish with standard archaeological methods. Simulation modeling offers a solution to this issue, but it is first necessary to delimit a site catchment, or “zone of impact”, around archaeological sites in which to carry out human–environment interaction modeling. To that end, I have developed a new method for GIS-based catchment reconstruction and distilled it into a custom module (r.catchment) for GRASS GIS, which calculates catchments of a given area based on anisotropic travel costs from a point of origin. One method of applying this new module in exploratory catchment modeling is discussed using the pastoral economy of the Late Neolithic period in Wadi Ziqlâb, Northern Jordan as a test case. A model of Late Neolithic herding economy and ecology is constructed, which combines data from archaeology, phytogeography, range science, agronomy, and ethnohistory. Four sizes of pastoral catchments are then derived using r.catchment, and the herd ecology model is used to estimate the stocking-rate (carrying capacity) of mixed goat and sheep herds for each catchment. The human populations these herd numbers could support (between 3 and 630 people in the Wadi) are then compared with human population estimates derived from household architectural analyses (between 18 and 54 people in the Wadi) to determine the most probable catchment configurations. The results indicate that the most probable zone of impact around the known Late Neolithic sites in Wadi Ziqlâb was somewhere between 9 and 20 square kilometers, delineated by 3 and 4.5 km pasture radii respectively.     

Vattel's theory of the international order: Commerce and the balance of power in the Law of Nations

Vattel's Law of Nations (1758) claimed that a system of independent states could maintain the liberty of each without undermining the ideal of an international society. The chief institution serving this purpose was the balance of power. In Vattel's account, the balance of power could be stabilized if it operated primarily through a process of commercial preferences and restrictions. These limits on how states ought to defend themselves were grounded in Vattel's thoroughly forgotten writings on the mid-eighteenth-century luxury debates, which addressed the political economy of reforming the state and pacifying the international order. An examination of Vattel's Law of Nations in this context shows that his approach to the law of nations should not be dismissed as a capitulation to the harsh reality of international politics.     

Decline in firing technology or poorer fuel resources? High-temperature thermoluminescence (HTTL) archaeothermometry of Neolithic ceramics from Pool,Sanday, Orkney

The Neolithic ceramic assemblage from the multi-period coastal settlement at Pool on the island of Sanday, Orkney is unique because it stratigraphically spans both the earlier round-based (including possible Unstan bowls) and later flat-based (‘Grooved Ware’) traditions. High-temperature thermoluminescence (HTTL) analysis objectively demonstrates that ceramics from the earliest Neolithic layers have been consistently better fired compared to examples from later layers. We suggest two interpretations of these data: either firing technology declined with changing social structures and/or adoption of a different ceramic tradition or that there was greater pressure on fuel resource and management in the later Neolithic. Paleoenvironmental and chronological evidence indicate climatic deterioration in the later Neolithic, which adds further support to an interpretation of a poorer fuel resource at that time. In addition to studies of the HTTL signal, analysis of the ambient temperature modification of the TL signal has potential to support or evaluate dating evidence, and is readily applicable to optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) age data.     

"Dead or Banished": A Comparative Reading of the Stories of King Oedipus and King David

The rise and fall of two of the most famous legendary kings, Oedipus and David, seem to bear great resemblance to each other. This is especially the case in the central narrative of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and the Second Book of Samuel where the kings are usurped by a close relative upon the intercession of a violent third party. The article argues that the stories are based on conventions of the rise and fall of a sacred king who restores order to a violent and “plagued” kingdom. It proposes a comparative reading of the texts, in conjunction with an anthropological reading in accordance with the insights of Rene Girard. This will provide not only a way of reading these ancient texts but also give insight into the perspective of and reality referred to in the texts. This is to read the text with appreciation of the dynamics of text and reader through the anthropological perspective opened up by the recognition of the victim.     

The battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli,Giustizia e Libertà, OVRA and the origins of Mussolini's anti‐Semitic campaign

This study draws attention to the intensity of the conflict between Carlo Rosselli and Giustizia e Libertà (the Italian liberal‐socialist anti‐Fascist organization) and the highest ranks of Italian Fascism, including Mussolini and OVRA ‐ the Fascist secret police ‐between 1933 and 1936. The activities of Rosselli and Giustizia e Libertà can be considered in the light of their secret attempts to organize the assassination of Mussolini and their efforts to disseminate broader anti‐Fascist sentiment in Italy. The militants of Giustizia e Libertà in Turin were key figures in the second of these operations. But the success of agents of OVRA in infiltrating Giustizia e Libertà resulted in three waves of arrests in Turin (in 1934, 1935 and 1936). However, Rosselli and GL showed a great capacity for recovery. By focusing on the struggle between Giustizia e Libertà and Fascism which had all the features of a civil war, and on the events in Turin in the period 1933–6, this research shows that the conflict between Fascism and anti‐Fascism was a central feature of the history of Italian Fascism even at the height of the regime's power. The article also offers a specific but incomplete study of the activities of OVRA. Since many of the members of Giustizia e Libertà in Turin were Jews, it also shows how OVRA's efforts to dismantle Giustizia e Libertà in Turin were closely linked to Mussolini's first anti‐Semitic campaign in 1934.