A Revealed Preference Approach to Ranking City Quality of Life

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for ranking city quality of life. I use data from the 1980 and the 1990 Census of Population and Housing to rank cities. My approach relaxes the standard "hedonic" method′s assumptions that all city local public goods are observed and that the implicit prices of all skills and apartment attributes are equal across cities. I find that Los Angeles and San Francisco have higher quality of life than Chicago and Houston in both 1980 and 1990. I find that quality of life in New York City fell during the 1980′s. © 1995 Academic Press, Inc.