Measuring public service quality: Revisiting residential location choice using emergy synthesis of local governments in Pennsylvania

Abstract

In this article, we present a study of local governments in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania measuring public service quality and revisiting residential location choice. This study adopts “emergy” (spelled with an “m”), a relatively new unit of measuring energy quality, to quantify the quality of public service. The concept of neighborhood choice has evolved to incorporate distance to center, transportation modes and commute time, match between household income and housing price, availability of public services and education, and own-group preference by ethnic or socioeconomic status. Despite the quality of public service by local governments being identified a critical factor affecting residential location choice, it has received less attention because of the nebulous concept and immeasurable characteristics. The emergy analysis of a local government system allows for testing of incompatible units of a socio-economic phenomenon. This study confirms the conventional residential sorting theory that people tend to travel further for cheaper houses and for better education, but people do not travel further for a higher quality of hard infrastructure such as road network and maintenance.