Local employment, poverty, and property value effects of geographically-targeted tax incentives: An instrumental variables approach

By A. Hanson. 2009

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The federal Empowerment Zone (EZ) program is a set of tax incentives targeted to areas of select cities. I estimate the effect of the EZ program on employment, poverty, and property values by comparing areas that received an EZ to areas that applied (and qualified), but were rejected. Because of endogeneity concerns, I use political representation to instrument for EZ designation. OLS results show a positive and statistically significant effect of the program on employment and poverty. IV estimates suggest the program had no effect on employment and poverty, and instead had a large statistically significant effect on property values.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e23818dd7b5b1db7a148b034c5505d1184c9d45a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Joseph T. Marchand
2. Shawn M. Rohlin
3. A. Hanson
4. T. Measham
5. D. Fleming

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Joseph T. Marchand
2. Shawn M. Rohlin
3. A. Hanson

Citations in the corpus

• Local Labor Market Impacts of Energy Boom-Bust-Boom in Western Canada (2012, background): “And Hanson (2009), controlling for endogeneity bias which many other studies ignore, also finds that there is no significant employment effect of these policies.”
• Do spatially targeted redevelopment programs spillover (2013, background): “Hanson (2009) finds no effect of zone designation on the employment rate of zone residents.”
• Policies for Local Development: An Evaluation of Italy's 'Patti Territoriali' (2012, unknown): “17 We use the routine proposed by Leuven and Sianesi (2003). Matches are selected by the method of the nearest neighbor with replacement and within a caliper (0.”
• Causal Inference in Urban and Regional Economics (2014, unknown): “Of course, isolating a causal effect of police requires controlling for other policy changes implemented during election cycles.19 Hanson (2009) and Hanson and Rohlin (2011) use congressional representation on the Ways and Means Committee as an instrument for selection of proposed EZs for federal…”
• Do Unemployed Workers Benefit from Enterprise Zones? The French Experience (2012, unknown): “In line with Hanson (2009), we also experimented with political variables which are the frequencies of votes for political parties.”