Title: The quality of life in U.S. metropolitan areas in the 1990s

Authors: Lall Ramrattan, Michael Szenberg, Thomas J. Webster

Addresses: University of California, Berkeley, USA. ' Pace University, USA. ' Pace University, USA

Abstract: This paper develops a quality-of-life index (QLI) for 129 U.S. Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas in terms of their geographic amenity and disamenity characteristics. This study takes a general equilibrium approach to quality-of-life rankings by simultaneously considering the locational choices of consumers and producers. This approach yielded implicit equilibrium prices that simultaneously cleared the housing and labor markets permitting metropolitan area rankings based on consumer and producer choices over amenities and disamenities bundles. Finally, the study utilized principal component analysis to overcome the problem of multicollinearity between and among ||weather normal|| indicators, which were used to generate quality-of-life rankings of metropolitan areas for which a consistent data was available.

Keywords: quality of life index; USA; United States; location choices; equilibrium prices; metropolitan area rankings; consumer choices; producer choices; amenities; disamenities; principal component analysis; PCA; metropolitan areas.

DOI: 10.1504/IER.2001.053864

Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, 2001 Vol.3 No.1, pp.1 - 13

Published online: 13 May 2013 *

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