Essays in Public Economics

This thesis focuses on multiple themes in the field of public economics with intersectionsin development economics, environmental economics, and political economy. The overarching themes of this work are focuses on the city, institutions, and economic and environmental justice. The first chapter examines on the impact of lead abatement laws on eviction. The second chapter evaluates Myanmar’s National Community Driven Development Program. The final chapter examines the role of one’s representative on their home’s price. An abstract of each chapter is as follows:

Lead paint in old houses is the leading cause of leadpoisoning in children under 6 today. To combat this problem, several states have passed lead abatement laws, forcing landlords to remove lead in the homes they rent if tenants have children under the age of 6. However, these laws have unintended consequences, causing landlords to evict tenants rather than abate lead. I use a difference-in-differences approach while employing various model specifications with various fixed effects and sets of controls to examine the impact of Ohio’s 2003 lead abatement law on eviction rates. Using newly collected data from the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, I find that the passage of Ohio’s lead abatement law sharply increased targeted evictions. Due to the law’s passage, the average census district in Ohio faced an increased eviction rate of roughly 0.457 points, corresponding to an additional 13.93 evictions a year. These impacts are highly statistically significant, sizeable, and economically meaningful, indicating that policy makers should incorporate distributional consequences when designing future lead abatement laws in order to avoid unintended consequences and ensure equitable outcomes.

Community driven development (CDD) has become acommon method of distributing aid throughout the developing world. Founded on two guiding principles, decentralization of the aid distribution process and empowerment through participation, CDD programs encourage community involvement in all steps of the development project. We evaluate Myanmar’s National Community Driven Development Program (NCDDP) by implementing a regression discontinuity design in sampling that takes advantage of the discontinuous cutoff in program receipt at the township border by sampling matched pairs of villages across program borders. We find that CDD successfully delivers village infrastructure, in line with the results of previous CDD evaluations. Moreover, in contrast to previous findings in the literature, we find large positive effects of CDD enrollment on the diversity and quality of local governance structures and greater participation of women and ethnic minorities. Finally, we provide novel evidence that these changes in local governance are associated with detectable improvements in local public goods provision beyond the scope of the CDD program, as measured by village-level responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, CDD villages enact more significantly more of the recommended measures to contain the spread of disease. These results provide evidence that CDD participation

Congressional and state representatives and their parties use their political power to send kickbacks to their districts, providing funding for public goods and targeted investment within their district. However, representatives do not have an equal ability to do this, as those with longer tenure, important committee posts, and in more competitive districts have the ability to send more kickbacks to their districts. I estimate the impact of one's representative and district, at the state house, state senate, and congressional level, on housing prices using the 2010 redistricting to identify the impact of one's representative on housing prices. I first develop a model of political competition and housing prices with testable implications to bring to the data. Using data from InfoUSA, containing roughly 130 million housing transactions per year, from 2006 to 2014, combined with data on state and federal representatives, I identify and examine the impact of one's representative on housing prices using multiple methods, including location fixed effects, a regression discontinuity design, and an instrumental variables design. I find that "packing" districts so that they are not competitive is not only used to dilute voting power, but dilute local wealth as well, that more powerful representatives use that power to increase the value of their constituents' homes, and that representatives in the party in control of the respective house are able to use this power to send kickbacks to their constituents. Not only does partisan gerrymandering come at a social and political cost, but a great economic cost as well.