This Paper examines city formation in a country whose urban population is growing steadily over time, with new cities required to accommodate this growth. In contrast to most of the literature there is immobility of housing and urban infrastructure, and investment in these assets is taken on the...

On the basis of a large (new) dataset of cities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in the millennium between 800 and 1800, we try to provide an answer to the question why, during this millennium, the urban center of gravity moved from Iraq (or more generally the Arab world) to Western...

This paper asks whether Germany was ever an economically integrated area. I explore the geography of trade costs in a new data set of about 40,000 observations on regional trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 – 1933. There are three key results. First, the...

The paper studies the political and economic determinants of inter-regional public transfers. It points to an important difference between two alternative federal fiscal constitutions. The paper shows that inter-regional transfers can be determined either by a federation-wide vote over a...

This paper analyses policy centralization outcomes in a two-jurisdiction model of public good provision choices with heterogeneous policy preferences and inter-jurisdictional policy spillovers under two alternative political procedures: direct referendum and representative democracy. We show...

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This Paper has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules,...

Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party secretaries who rose from low to high positions within...

The explosion of globalization has increased firms incentives to exploit international tax differentials to their benefit. In this paper we consider a simple world with two countries with different market sizes and two multinationals with a division in each country. Both countries use a...

This Paper explores the theoretical relationship between tax relief for private giving and locational equilibria. Tax relief for giving may receive political support at the local level because of its distributional effects; however, through its effects on public provision choices, such relief...

This Paper outlines some issues regarding the interaction of independent fiscal authorities and one central bank in the European monetary union. It points out the possibilities for coordination failures, ranging everywhere from potentially excessive deficits and free-riding problems to...