About

David Yves Albouy is a professor in the Department of Economics at Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. His research examines how federal tax burdens and spending, as well as public goods, are distributed geographically. He also studies local differences in pay, productivity, housing costs, and quality of life. Albouy holds a B.A. in Education History, Philosophy, and Economics from McGill University, an M.A. in Economics from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. His work has contributed to understanding the spatial distribution of economic resources and amenities, and he has published extensively on topics related to land valuation, public infrastructure, amenities, and urban economics.

Research topics

• Economics
• Finance
• Microeconomics
• Economic growth
• Public economics
• Econometrics
• Business
• Geography

Selected publications

• Skills, Migration, and Urban Amenities Over the Life Cycle

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Skills, Migration and Urban Amenities Over the Life Cycle

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Skills, Migration and Urban Amenities over the Life Cycle

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-03-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Skills, Migration, and Urban Amenities Over the Life Cycle

  2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals' life cycles.We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life.Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties and forties.Consequently, individuals' time use and expenditures on activities related to local amenities are U-shaped over the life cycle.This contrasts with well-documented life-cycle consumption profiles, which have an opposite inverted-U shape.We present evidence that the move towards lower-amenity (and lower-cost) metropolitan areas is driven by changes in the number of household children over the life cycle: individuals, particularly the college educated, tend to move towards lower-amenity areas after having their first child.We develop an equilibrium model of location choice, labor supply, and amenity consumption and introduce life-cycle changes in household composition that affect leisure preferences, consumption choices, and required home production time.Key to the model is a complementarity between leisure time spent going out and local amenities, which we estimate to be large and significant.Ignoring this complementarity and the distinction between types of leisure misses the dampening effect child rearing has on urban agglomeration.Since the value of local amenities is capitalized into housing prices, individuals will tend to move to lower-cost locations to avoid paying for amenities they are not consuming.

  PublisherDOI

• Skills, Migration, and Urban Amenities over the Life Cycle 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Value of Rural and Urban Public Infrastructure

  Economic Development Quarterly · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Business
  • Economic growth

  The authors estimate the value of public infrastructure using a panel of rural and urban counties in the United States from 1970 to 2012. Regression estimates imply public infrastructure increases employment more in urban counties, while improving property values more in rural ones; positive effects on income are similar. Spatial equilibrium modeling suggests public capital has similar quality-of-life and productivity benefits in urban and rural areas but does more to reduce costs of providing housing in urban ones. While public investments in rural and urban counties appear to pass conventional cost–benefit tests, dollar-per-dollar they are more valuable in urban counties.

  PublisherDOI

• A statistical learning approach to land valuation: Optimizing the use of external information

  Journal of Housing Economics · 2022-10-31 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Statistical Learning Approach to Land Valuation: Optimizing the Use of External Information

  Working paper · 2022-11-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We develop a statistical learning model to estimate the value of vacant land for any parcel, regardless of improvements.Rooted in economic theory, the model optimizes how to combine common improved property sales with rare, but more informative, vacant land sales.It estimates how land values change with geography and other features, and determines how much information either vacant or improved sales provide to nearby areas through spatial correlation.For most census tracts, incorporating improved sales often doubles the certainty of land value estimates.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Local Labor Markets in Canada and the United States

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2021-02-28 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We examine local labor markets in the United States and Canada from 1990 to 2011 using comparable household and business data. Wage levels and inequality rise with city population in both countries, albeit less in Canada.

  OA PDFDOI

• Unlocking amenities: Estimating public good complementarity

  Journal of Public Economics · 2020 · 45 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Microeconomics
  • Public economics
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Quality of Life, Productivity, and the Value of Amenities across Cities: Theory and Applications

  NSF · $267k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Gabriel Ehrlich

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  109 shared

• Casey Warman

  87 shared

• Bryan A. Stuart

  Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

  86 shared

• Fernando Leibovici

  83 shared

• Minchul Shin

  Korea Institute of Toxicology

  44 shared

• Minchul Shin

  43 shared

• Kristian Behrens

  Université du Québec à Montréal

  32 shared

• Frédéric Robert‐Nicoud

  31 shared