P A R T V I I Quality of Life Urban areas both attract and repel people. Cities offer high-paying jobs, parks, museums, nightlife, and a seemingly infinite variety of consumer goods. They also offer crime, pollution, noise, difficult commutes, crowds, a reduced sense of community | A Companion to Urban Economics Edited by Richard J. Arnott Daniel P. McMillen Copyright 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd I P A R T V I I Quality of Life A Companion to Urban Economics Edited by Richard J. Arnott Daniel P. McMillen Copyright 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Quality of Life Urban areas both attract and repel people. Cities offer high-paying jobs parks museums nightlife and a seemingly infinite variety of consumer goods. They also offer crime pollution noise difficult commutes crowds a reduced sense of community and a greater transience of social relationships. Some people love urban life others prefer to avoid even visiting cities. Even within urban areas neighborhoods vary dramatically. Poverty-stricken crime-ridden neighborhoods offer a striking contrast to beautiful expensive neighborhoods with excellent schools and virtually no crime. It is probably this contrast between wealth and poverty that has led urban economists to be so interested in measuring and analyzing the quality of life both within and across urban areas. One of the most important roles of urban economists is to help design policies that help improve the quality of life for residents of urban areas. The most common framework used by urban economists to measure urban amenities is the hedonic model. The hedonic approach which is used to measure the implicit price of the components of a multidimensional product such as housing has a long and rich empirical tradition. It was used in early studies to measure the implicit price of components of an automobile - weight engine size interior room and so on. The hedonic approach has been used to measure the price of various attributes of a personal computer and it is used by labor economists to measure compensating differentials for such labor-market characteristics as workplace safety. Urban economists most commonly use the hedonic approach in studies of the housing market. For example suppose that we want to measure the value that urban .
