We examine two factors that might explain the extent of air traffic delays in the United States: network benefits due to hubbing and congestion externalities. Airline hubs enable passengers to cross-connect to many destinations, thus creating network benefits that increase in the number of...

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the contribution of air services toward this outcome. This paper exploits the unexpected market changes induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to bring new evidence on the...

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, repeated airport closures due to potential security breaches have imposed substantial costs on travelers, airlines, and government agencies in terms of flight delays and cancellations. Using data from the year following September 11th, this study...

The airline industry's current financial crisis has raised concerns over the ramifications of airline bankruptcies for air service and the economy. Such bankruptcies, however, nearly always occur when demand is weak, and, thus, when even healthy airlines are inclined to reduce flights. Moreover,...

We examine the welfare effects of provision of local public goods in an empirically relevant setting using a multi-community model with mobile and heterogeneous households, and with flexible housing supplies. We characterize the first-best allocation and show efficiency can be implemented with...

We study the relationship between decentralization of R&D, innovation and firm performance using a novel dataset on the organizational structure of 1,290 American publicly-listed corporations, 2,615 of their affiliate firms, as well as characteristics of 594,903 patents that they hold. We...

We study the effect of decentralization on the access to some poverty-related public services in Benin. Compiling panel data from local governments' accounts and from surveys on 18,000 Beninese households performed in 2006 and 2007, our study suggests that decentralization has a positive overall...

Motivated by a novel stylized fact - countries with isolated capital cities display worse quality of governance - we provide a framework of endogenous institutional choice based on the idea that elites are constrained by the threat of rebellion, and that this threat is rendered less effective by...

Decentralization has been put forward as a powerful tool to reduce poverty and improve governance in Africa. The aim of this paper is to study the existence, and identify the nature, of spillovers resulting from local expenditure policies. These spillovers impact the efficiency of...

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...