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...

Both individual experiences and community characteristics influence how much people trust each other. Using individual level data drawn from US localities we find that the strongest factors associated with low trust are: i) a recent history of traumatic experiences; ii) belonging to a group that...

Regions can benefit by offering infrastructure services that are differentiated by quality, thus segmenting the market for industrial location. Regions that compete on infrastructure quality have an incentive to increase the degree of differentiation between them. This places an upper bound on...

Do inter-governmental transfers such as equalization grants reduce interregional disparities? This paper studies both theoretically and empirically the impact of interregional redistribution on interregional inequality. We set up a model with residential choice and equalization grants between...

This paper explores the effect of racial segregation on public school expenditure in US metropolitan areas and school districts. Our starting point is the literature that relates public good provision to the degree of racial fragmentation in the community. We argue that looking at fragmentation...

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...

The extent of political and fiscal centralization in Russia has experienced dramatic changes since the end of the Soviet era. The heavily centralized, both politically and economically, federal structures became dysfunctional and unstable until the introduction of the Budget and Tax Codes over...

International markets for tradable emission permits (TEP) co-exist with national energy taxation. A firm trading emission permits in the international market also pays energy taxes in its host country, thus creating an interaction between the international TEP-market and national energy taxes....

The Paper studies the effects and the determinants of interregional redistribution in a model of residential and political choice. We find that paradoxical consequences of interjurisdictional transfers can arise if people are mobile: while self-sufficient regions are necessarily identical with...

Conventional wisdom suggests that aging of population will increase political pressure to tilt the composition of social spending in favour of the elderly, while potentially sacrificing other publicly provided goods such as education. This view seems to be supported by recent empirical findings...