Why Is Infrastructure Construction So Expensive in the US?

A crucial cause of growth and economic opportunity is high-quality public infrastructure. However, as Professor Liscow has shown in earlier work, infrastructure costs have skyrocketed in the US – and these costs are far higher than in other countries. The US's failure to build quality infrastructure at reasonable speed and reasonable cost is a big reason why we "can't have nice things" -- and may also prevent the US from transitioning to clean energy production. Part of the project is understanding why US infrastructure construction costs are so high by exploiting variation in policies across US states and across countries. We are seeing where costs are highest and then developing solutions where policies drive up costs with little benefit. Another part of the project is using rich, new employment data to measure the causal impact of having high-quality construction managers, to measure the extent to which weak state capacity drives up construction costs.