Tax increment financing (TIF) has been adopted widely by municipalities in the United States as an economic development tool. Despite the large number of state initiatives and TIF's increasing popularity, few statistical studies have been conducted to examine the direct effect of the TIF program from an economic perspective. This article analyzes the effect of TIF plans on property value growth by comparing pre-TIF to post-TIF property value changes in a first-difference model. The empirical results from a panel of Indiana cities indicate that the TIF program has increased median owner-occupied housing values in a TIF-adopting city by 11% relative to what it would have been without TIF. This finding suggests that the TIF program effectively stimulates property value growth in an entire community.Over the past few decades, state and local governments have provided various tax and financial incentives in an attempt to stimulate local economic development. One of the most popular local development tools is tax increment financing (TIF). TIF has been used primarily as a means to pay for the public investments or improvements (i.e., water and sewer lines, streets, lighting, parking lots, land procurement, etc.) needed to attract economic development or retain businesses that are seeking to expand. The TIF program largely freezes the assessed valuation of all parcels in a designated area (the TIF district). Property taxes levied on this frozen tax base continue to accrue to local taxing bodies. Taxes produced from the increases in AUTHORS' NOTE: We thank Norman Walzer, John Mikesell, Kurt Zom, Bob Kirk, and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. We are indebted to the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment at Indiana University (Indianapolis) for financial and other support. Any remaining errors are our own.

Many policy analysts have cautioned against public spending for professional and amateur sports. Within the last year, numerous cities have received demands from major and minor league teams for investments. n e s e investments by the public sector can involve hundreds of millions of dollars and are usually ddended by the economic impact of the facilities or teams and the economic development and revitalization which will follow. Indianapolis formulated an economic development strategy which relied substantially on sports. In addition, its development policies did not involve one team or facility, but a series of

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The association between municipal fragmentation and suburban sprawl is examined, based on a cross-sectional analysis of all U.S. and Canadian metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 residents in the 1990s. Results reveal that this association is rather weak but significant and is sustained even when the less fragmented and more compact Canadian metropolitan areas are excluded from the analysis. The impact of residential sprawl on fragmentation is significant, but fragmentation does not predict sprawl. Low levels of fragmentation do not guarantee compact development, but lack of excessive fragmentation might be a precondition for compact development in North America.

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