using macroeconomic data on employment, unemployment, participation, and (for Canada) migration and real wages. We find that … flexible, particularly with regard to migration, while those further east are less so. …

. We distinguish three modes of unionization with increasing degree of centralization: (1) ‘decentralization’ where wages … firms, and (3) ‘centralization’ where an industry union sets a uniform wage rate for all firms. While firms' investment … incentives are largest under ‘centralization’, investment incentives are non-monotone in the degree of centralization …

. We show that corruption opportunities are lower under centralization at each period of time. However, centralization … makes more difficult for citizens to detect corrupt incumbents. Thus, corruption is easier under centralization for low … levels of political competition. We show that the relative advantage of centralization depends negatively on the quality of …

This paper analyses policy centralization outcomes in a two-jurisdiction model of public good provision choices with … referendum and representative democracy. We show that policy centralization is more likely to occur if the choice to centralize … preferred level of the jurisdiction that least favours centralization, rather than to a compromise between the two jurisdictions …

, centralization reduces capture, and is more likely to be welfare enhancing in the presence of information asymmetries. Then, we apply …

optimally. Centralization is shown to dominate when governments are benevolent. With regionally biased governments, both … centralization and decentralization are suboptimal as long as political bargaining does not take place. With bargaining, however, the … first best can often be achieved under decentralization, but not under centralization. At the root of this result is the …

bias toward excessive centralization and small size of the union, however. This bias can be corrected if there is a …