The empirical results of this paper are derived from a monopoly view of local government decisionmaking in contrast to the competitive view offered by earlier researchers. That our results are similar to earlier findings lends additional support to the conclusion that local output is largely...

It has been argued that organizations which are unable to directly appropriate any of the firm's residual earnings tend to experience various forms of wealth-taking by managers (Alchian and Kessel, 1962). This wealth-taking has been observed in privately-owned, regulated firms (Nelson, 1980) as...

We have found that the fiscal power of a city can be increased by extension of its borders within a land area that is homogeneous with respect to earning opportunities, even when numerous rival jurisdictions exist in the area. We hypothesized that extending municipal boundaries will have a...

The empirical literature on the publicness of local government services has observed no significant degree of publicness. It is difficult to reconcile these findings with Wyckoff's conclusion that bureaucrats prefer pure public goods. Wyckoff's solution is to suggest that bureaucracy has little...

Our results confirm the existence of a positive direct effect of cross subsidies from municipally owned water utilities on city spending. While the results are consistent with the hypothesis that internal subsidization creates a fiscal illusion, they are also consistent with vote-maximizing...

The shift in the institutional stucture in California in 1963 simultaneously reduced the ability of new cities to incorporate and elevated the status of annexation as a favored municipal growth policy. This study finds that cities which grew more rapidly by annexation also experienced more rapid...

Prior research has shown that residency laws increase the productivity of municipal employees, which tends to reduce per unit operating cost. However, this gain in efficiency appears to have been lost when one considers that public employee groups tend to be ‘high demanders’ who have a...