The Effect of State Policy on Urban Performance

Funding: The Fannie Mae Foundation

Summary: To what extent and how does state government policy affect the performance of major cities within the state on a wide variety of indicators of resident well-being? The project will proceed by first identifying cities that have performed well between 1990-2000 on each of a series of 20 indicators (e.g., change in poverty rate, unemployment rate, housing affordability, crime rate, etc.). It will then model performance on each of these indicators to identify cities that performed better than the model would have predicted. Case studies will then be conducted to assess whether this better than expected performance was due to state (or city) policies directed at the state’s cities.