The recent, much remarked upon decentralization in Bolivia produced four important changes in the nation's public finances: (1) a sharp fall in the geographic concentration of investment; (2) a sea-change in the uses of investment away from infrastructure towards the social sectors; (3) a...

The paper is intended to provide a theoretical contribution to the analysis of central government's normative economic policies in a framework where regional provision of goods with negative spillovers, and public goods used to reduce related externalities, are considered. Firstly the range of...

This article identifies a significant phenomenon in current urban settings, according to which the otherwise unorganized users of government-owned local public goods, such as parks or playgrounds, often engage in informal cooperation and coordination in the on-going operation, maintenance and...

This paper considers the decentralized funding of public universities in a federation when students and graduates are mobile. In particular, I discuss whether local governments should be given the right to differentiate tuition fees between in-state and out-of-state students. I develop a model...

In this paper, we present a model of a one parent-one child household where parental decisions on labor supply, leisure, and the demand for private and public child care are simultaneously endogenized and intertemporally determined. We characterize the path of the optimal decisions and...

We analyze whether globalization affects the composition of public expenditures for education by integrating arguments from the Heckscher-Ohlin and the tax competition literature into a common theoretical framework. The model suggests that with increasing global integration, developing countries...

A strong case for public provision of certain private goods has been established for an economy in which individuals have homogeneous preferences but differ in skill levels. There has been a critique of this model/mechanism arguing that heterogeneous preferences at a given skill level would...

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analyzed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be a payment for...