Measuring Social Benefits Attributable to Social Infrastructure in Boomtowns

摘要

A prerequisite for evaluating alternative investment programs for urban infrastructure is some measure for the benefits attributable to such investments, In boomtowns, benefit measures are of particular importance inasmuch as investment planners may wish to compare the costs of (potentially) excess capacities in the post-boom period with the benefits of higher infrastructure stock levels during the boom. Unfor¬tunately, little is understood concerning a methodology for deriving these benefit measures, and to date investment planning for urban infra-structure has been based simply on cost minimization techniques.nIn this dissertation a methodology for developing values which might serve as benefit measures for alternative levels of urban infra¬structure is developed and tested, A theoretical argument is proposed which results in a statistically testable proposition concerning trade¬offs between wages and levels of urban infrastructure.