Economic issues will be key determinants of the outcome of the Scottish referendum on independence. Pensions are a key element of the economic case for or against independence. The costs of funding pensions in an independent Scotland would be influenced by mortality risks, the costs of borrowing...

This paper studies the dynamics by which populations with heterogeneous preferences for public good provision sort themselves into communities. I conduct laboratory experiments to consider which institutions best facilitate efficient self-organization when residents can move freely between...

Governments do not have perfect information regarding the priorities and the needs of different groups in the economy. This lack of knowledge opens the door for different groups to lobby the government in order to receive the government’s support. We set up a model of hierarchical contests and...

We compare centralized and decentralized policy making in a federation in which policy heterogeneity is inherently costly and preferences vary across jurisdictions: all jurisdictions agree that some harmonization is desirable but no one agrees on the direction of harmonization. This type of...

The paper investigates the effect of electoral rules on voter turnout. It focuses on Italian municipalities, where a single ballot system applies to municipalities with less than 15,000 inhabitants, while a dual ballot system applies above that threshold. By exploiting this discontinuity, the...

This paper studies fiscal federalism when regions differ in voters’ ability to monitor public officials. We develop a model of political agency in which rent-seeking politicians provide public goods to win support from heterogeneously informed voters. In equilibrium, voter information...

Il presente lavoro tratta, con strumenti di analisi economica, un particolare aspetto del sistema italiano delle autonomie. Vengono formalizzati alcuni effetti del complesso dei poteri che permette ad Autorità regionali di ridurre, ritardare o paralizzare l’impatto delle politiche nazionali....

Charles Tiebout's suggestion that people "vote with their feet" for communities with optimal bundles of taxes and public goods has played a central role in local public finance for over 50 years. Using a locational equilibrium model, we derive formal tests of his premise. The model predicts...

We examine how politics and policy have affected remote-work rates in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Current Population Survey, American Community Survey, and the American Time Use Survey, which have several different measures of remote work, we examine how trends in remote work...

The goal of this paper is twofold: First, to develop an estimable model of legislative politics in the US Congress, second, to provide a greater understanding of the objectives behind the New Deal. In the theoretical model, the distribution of federal funds across regions of the country is the...