Browsing by Author "Timmins, C"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
Does the median voter consume too much water? Analyzing the redistributive role of residential water bills
(National Tax Journal, 2002-12-01) Timmins, C
According to allocative efficiency criteria, water in the American West is often underpriced in urban sales. The political-economic process that motivates municipal managers to impose the resulting deadweight losses on their constituencies is analyzed with a median voter model of choice between alternative municipal revenue sources. The implications of this model are tested empirically, and the results confirm the conclusions of previous empirical research by suggesting that cities with more skewed income distributions tend to engage in more redistributive activities than other conditionally similar communities.
Open Access
Estimating equilibrium models of sorting across locations
(Economic Journal, 2007-03-01) Bayer, P; Timmins, C
While there is growing interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers, it is well understood that such spillovers cannot be distinguished from unobservable local attributes using solely the observed location decisions of individuals or firms. We propose an empirical strategy for recovering estimates of spillovers in the presence of unobserved local attributes for a broadly applicable class of equilibrium sorting models. Our approach relies on an IV strategy derived from the internal logic of the sorting model itself. We show practically how the strategy is implemented, provide intuition for our instruments, discuss the role of effective choice-set variation in identifying the model, and carry-out a series of Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate performance in small samples. © 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2007.
Open Access
If you cannot take the heat, get out of the cerrado... Recovering the equilibrium amenity cost of nonmarginal climate change in Brazil
(Journal of Regional Science, 2007-02-01) Timmins, C
This paper presents an empirical technique for valuing large changes in nonmarketed local attributes (e.g., climate amenities) without data describing prices of locally traded commodities like housing. A model of endogenous sorting is used to identify individuals' indirect utility functions, from which the value of the change in the local attribute is recovered while accounting for equilibrium impacts on markets for labor and locally traded commodities. Annual amenity costs of Brazilian climate change are estimated to be between $1.6 and $8.1 billion for a moderate climate change scenario, depending upon the role of migration costs. © Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2007.
Open Access
Measuring the dynamic efficiency costs of regulators' preferences: Municipal water utilities in the Arid West
(Econometrica, 2002-04-13) Timmins, C
Evidence suggests that municipal water utility administrators in the western US price water significantly below its marginal cost and, in so doing, inefficiently exploit aquifer stocks and induce social surplus losses. This paper empirically identifies the objective function of those managers, measures the deadweight losses resulting from their price-discounting decisions, and recovers the efficient water pricing policy function from counterfactual experiments. In doing so, the estimation uses a "continuous-but-constrained-control" version of a nested fixed-point algorithm in order to measure the important intertemporal consequences of groundwater pricing decisions.
Open Access
Migration and hedonic valuation: The case of air quality
(Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2009-07-01) Bayer, P; Keohane, N; Timmins, C
Conventional hedonic techniques for estimating the value of local amenities rely on the assumption that households move freely among locations. We show that when moving is costly, the variation in housing prices and wages across locations may no longer reflect the value of differences in local amenities. We develop an alternative discrete-choice approach that models the household location decision directly, and we apply it to the case of air quality in US metro areas in 1990 and 2000. Because air pollution is likely to be correlated with unobservable local characteristics such as economic activity, we instrument for air quality using the contribution of distant sources to local pollution-excluding emissions from local sources, which are most likely to be correlated with local conditions. Our model yields an estimated elasticity of willingness to pay with respect to air quality of 0.34-0.42. These estimates imply that the median household would pay $149-$185 (in constant 1982-1984 dollars) for a one-unit reduction in average ambient concentrations of particulate matter. These estimates are three times greater than the marginal willingness to pay estimated by a conventional hedonic model using the same data. Our results are robust to a range of covariates, instrumenting strategies, and functional form assumptions. The findings also confirm the importance of instrumenting for local air pollution. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Open Access
The impact of piped water provision on infant mortality in Brazil: A quantile panel data approach
(Journal of Development Economics, 2010-07-01) Gamper-Rabindran, S; Khan, S; Timmins, C
We examine the impact of piped water on the under-1 infant mortality rate (IMR) in Brazil using a recently developed econometric procedure for the estimation of quantile treatment effects with panel data. The provision of piped water in Brazil is highly correlated with other observable and unobservable determinants of IMR - the latter leading to an important source of bias. Instruments for piped water provision are not readily available, and fixed effects to control for time-invariant correlated unobservables are invalid in the simple quantile regression framework. Using the quantile panel data procedure in Chen and Khan [Chen, S., Khan, S., Semiparametric estimation of non-stationary censored panel model data models with time-varying factor. Econometric Theory 2007; forthcoming], our estimates indicate that the provision of piped water reduces infant mortality by significantly more at the higher conditional quantiles of the IMR distribution than at the lower conditional quantiles (except for cases of extreme underdevelopment). These results imply that targeting piped water intervention toward areas in the upper quantiles of the conditional IMR distribution, when accompanied by other basic public health inputs, can achieve significantly greater reductions in infant mortality. © 2009 Elsevier B.V.