Whatever floats your vote: understanding voter support for public port infrastructure investments

Ports are a cornerstone of the local, state, and national economy, especially for coastal cities. However, ports face growing economic challenges that require infrastructure financing, and a relevant avenue of securing funds is through government assistance via bond issues. We examine voter support for the public financing of port infrastructure investments using a 2016 referendum in Rhode Island. Through our multiple regression voting model, we find strong evidence that public spending on ports in Rhode Island was more of a bipartisan issue compared to other public financing efforts on the ballot. Additionally, neighborhoods with a larger minority presence and those with higher median per capita income were more likely to support port development. In contrast, areas with a higher homeowner population and those communities farther from ports were less likely to support port spending. As a key novelty to our paper, we use our voting model results to forecast how a hypothetical port infrastructure bond might fare in other states, and find that regardless of socioeconomic and political differences, all coastal states in the US would be expected to pass a port referendum

Variation in Valuation: Open Space and Geography

We estimate hedonic valuation models of local open space separately for 215 cities in the Eastern US, and derive city-specific marginal willingness to pay (MWTP). We then examine variation in MWTP and city-level determinants. Valuation is largely local – relatively large changes in income or existing conservation lead to modest changes in MWTP – suggesting validity of benefit transfer across regions. However, geographic features that naturally limit development do correlate with MWTP. As a result, we examine geographic features as instrumental variables, and find that on average steep slope and water/wetlands yield valuation coefficients of opposite sign, consistent with a LATE interpretation