Local economies benefit from attracting in-migration either as workforce or as consumers. To compete for constituents, local economies need to provide attractive tax policy and expenditure bundles. An important consideration in this regard is the relative natural advantage of some locations in terms of its climate and geographical features, among other things. In this three-paper dissertation, I explore how natural amenities affect the variations in local government public goods and how people choose their residential locations as they trade-off between natural amenities and local government public goods as they go through phases in their life cycle. In Article 1, I propose that one of the reasons locations differ in their stock of local government public goods is because of differences in existing natural amenities by testing the hypothesis that some goods are substitutes while others are complements using spatial autoregressive random effects model estimation. In Article 2, I explore how local government expenditures and population vary in two contiguous areas that are similar in all but one natural amenity using border-matching methodology to determine how local government expenditures differ between counties sharing a border within a state that have the same level of natural amenities except for one natural feature. In Article 3, I use fixed effects panel data regression to test whether age and life milestones shape preferences and budget constraints of people when they choose residential locations as they trade-off between natural amenities and local government-provided public goods. My results indicate that some natural amenities are complements to local public goods while others are substitutes. Some expenditures are not affected by natural amenities because they have to be provided regardless of what are naturally available. Moreover, age and marital status are consistent predictors of moving. Natural amenities and certain per capita tax revenue and expenditure items also affect the likelihood of moving.