We investigate how the number and size of local political jurisdictions in an area is determined. Our model focuses on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we...

It is often argued that tax competition may lead to a "race to the bottom". Such a race may hold indeed in the case of the pure case of factor mobility (such as capital mobility). However, in this paper we emphasize the unique feature of labor migration, that may nullify the "race to the bottom"...

An important element in considering school finance policies is that households are not passive. Instead they respond to policies with a combination of modified residential choice and political choice of tax levels. The highly stylized decision models of most existing analyses, however, lead to...

Empirical evidence suggesting that a considerable amount of horizontal strategic interaction exists amongst governments is important in light of recent devolutionary trends of many important public programs. The empirical approach in these studies typically relies on estimating reaction...

Limited liability and asymmetric information between an investment bank and its lenders provide an incentive for a bank to undercapitalise and finance overly risky business projects. To counter this market failure, national governments have imposed solvency constraints on banks. However, these...

This paper studies how to design a fiscal constitution that, by capitalizing intergenerational spillovers into land values, is able to protect future generations from expropriation and to generate optimal investment in intergenerational public goods. In particular, we study how to accomplish...

We present a model where heterogeneous districts choose both whether to experiment and the policies to experiment with. Since districts learn from each other, the first-best requires that policy experiments converge so that innovations are useful also for neighbors. However, the equilibrium...

Various quasi-Newton methods periodically add a symmetric "correction" matrix of rank at most 2 to a matrix approximating some quantity A of interest (such as the Hessian of an objective function). In this paper we examine several ways to express a symmetric rank 2 matrix [delta] as the sum of...

Firms often receive multiple acceptable applications for vacancies, requiring a choice among candidates. This paper contrasts equilibria when firms select workers at random and when firms select the worker with the shortest spell of unemployment, called ranking. With the filling of vacancies...