Does Comparative Advantage Not Work for Buffalo?

Nick Gillespie notes in a recent post: [I]f working on Reason Saves Cleveland taught me one thing, it's that there's no simple solution to urban decline. Some of it is simply historical - the Northeast is not going to dominate American business and culture that way it did 100 years ago and cities such as …

Working Papers on Federalism & Public Policy

I have just posted a couple of my working papers to SSRN for those who are interested. They are as follows: "Public Policy and Quality of Life: An Empirical Analysis of Interstate Migration, 2000-2012" Abstract: Individuals and households choose their political jurisdiction of residence on the basis of expected income differentials and jurisdiction-specific characteristics covered …

Freedom and Migration: More Numbers

In Freedom in the 50 States, we present some statistical results on the association between the three dimensions of freedom -- fiscal, regulatory, and personal -- and "net interstate migration," that is, the number of movers into a state from other states minus the number of movers from a state to other states, divided by …

Now, where was I when we were so rudely interrupted?

Last time I was here, I had a lot of fun teasing American libertarian readers, at least until the earthquake brought my guest blogging to an abrupt halt. Support for liberty is a lot like support for GMO-free food. If you survey people, they'll tell you how much they love it. They might even tell …

Where You Live in the U.S. Is a Consumption Good, Part Two

I thought I would throw in a little economic research to support Grover Cleveland's point: Based on a panel of quality of life and business environment measures, households prefer MSAs in warm coastal areas and non-metropolitan locations, while firms prefer large, growing cities. In addition, cities with improving business environments acquire increasing shares of workers, …

Today in Neat-o Research

Jordan Rappaport, "Moving to Nice Weather," Regional Science and Urban Economics. U.S. residents have been moving en masse to places with nice weather. Well known is the migration towards places with warm winters, which is often attributed to the introduction of air conditioning. But people have also been moving to places with cooler, less-humid summers, …

Land-Use Regulation and Growth

I want to piggy-back here on Mark's great post on urban planning and the poor. I've been playing around with some state-level data on local land-use regulations and cost of living. The last decade in the U.S. has been one of very slow productivity growth. As a result, fast-growing states tend to be those with …

Texas Job Numbers and Inter-State Migration

Political Math's piece on Texas' amazing job growth has been getting a lot of attention around the 'Net. As regular Pileus readers know and as Political Math's piece confirms, job growth is largely a consequence of population growth, and population growth is largely a consequence of warm climate, low cost of living, low taxes, and …

More on Voting with Feet

At Volokh, Ilya Somin presents the evidence that people vote for economic freedom with their feet internationally and domestically. Pileus on inter-state migration here. Update:  Somin has more on this issue here.  And of course, please feel free to examine the original study comparing the states cited by both Eric Crampton and Somin.

Taxation, Regulation, and Migration

At the NY Times' Economix blog, Ed Glaeser takes up explanations for the relative population growth enjoyed by Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, compared to relative decline in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. If we ignore international migration, which tends to increase the population of Mexican border states especially, and natural increase, then the …

Apartheid’s Electoral System

Fivethirtyeight has a fascinating account of how South Africa's electoral system led to unchallenged National Party dominance and the imposition of apartheid. It's just a little more evidence that the worst electoral system ever devised is single-member-district plurality rule. The discussion of emigration at the end is also interesting for providing another case in which …