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The higher education system in the United States is characterized by a large degree of quality heterogeneity, and there is a growing literature suggesting students attending higher quality universities have better educational and labor market outcomes. In this paper, we use NLSY97 data combined with the difference in the timing and strength of the housing boom across cities to examine how short-run home price growth affects the quality of postsecondary schools chosen by students. Our findings indicate a $10,000 increase in a family's housing wealth in the four years prior to a student becoming of college-age increases the likelihood she attends a flagship public university relative to a non-flagship public university by 2.0 percent and decreases the relative probability of attending a community college by 1.6 percent. These effects are driven by relatively lower and middle-income families. We show that these changes are due to the effect of housing wealth on where students apply, not on whether they are admitted. We also find that short-run increases in home prices lead to increases in direct quality measures of the institutions students attend. Finally, for the lower-income sample, we find home price increases reduce student labor supply and that each $10,000 increase in home prices is associated with a 1.8% increase in the likelihood of completing college.

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We examine how location-based tax incentives affect quality of life and business environment through changes in property values and equilibrium wages. Using the federal Empowerment Zone program, we determine whether offering tax incentives to firms improves the welfare of the citizens and attractiveness to firms. We demonstrate that quality of life methodologies can be applied using small geographically aggregated data, such as census block groups. We find that the tax incentives offered by the program notably enhances the quality of business environment for firms in the area while modestly improving the quality of life for the individuals living in the area. * We would like to thank the Lincoln Land Institute for their generous financial support for this project. 2 The quality of business environment methodology attempts to measure the productivity of local amenities of an area. Although studying area-specific productivity has been an important and growing area of research (i.e.

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