Theories of government spending driven by a common-pool problem in the fiscal revenues pool predict that greater districting of a political jurisdiction raises the scale of government. This paper presents evidence on this and related predictions from a cross section of city governments in the...

We investigate whether political jurisdictions form in response to the trade-off between economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we test the model using American school districts, school attendance...