<DIV><DIV>Government spending has increased dramatically in the United States since World War II despite the many rules intended to rein in the insatiable appetite for tax revenue most politicians seem to share. Drawing on examples from the federal and state governments, <I>Rules and Restraint</I> explains in...</i></div></div>

Tools of direct democracy, such as the citizen initiative, are available at both the state and local levels in the United States, yet models of the process typically do not consider these institutions in tandem. In this article, I develop a model of local fiscal policy that incorporates the...

A distributive politics model establishes that the presence of exogenously enforceable spending limits reduces spending and that the effect of executive veto authority is contingent on whether spending is capped and whether the chief executive is a liberal or conservative. Surprisingly, when...

Most political bargaining in the U.S. system has two features which are constitutionally mandated: (1) only one actor can make a formal proposal, and (2) he or she can make an indefinite number of proposals. Existing work in economics and political science ignores at least one of these features....

TYPE="ORG" OID="af2" CNY="US">Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Scholars within different disciplines employ a wide range of empirical approaches to understanding how, why and with what consequences government is organized. We first review recent statistical modeling efforts in the areas of education, job-training, welfare reform and drug abuse treatment and...

This paper estimates the returns to retraining for older displaced workers—those 35 or older—by estimating the impact of community college schooling on earnings. Our analysis relies on longitudinal administrative records covering workers displaced from jobs in Washington State during the...

Most of the formal studies of cultural policy concentrate on the role of central governments and their approaches to supporting the arts, creative industries and heritage. Less attention has been given to cultural policy at the sub-national level despite the fact that the states in the United...