We model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote. We adopt a number of simplifying assumptions: the founders and the candidates are fixed; the society operates for a fixed number of periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period;...

Biodiversity provides essential services to human societies. Many of these services are provided as public goods, so that they will typically be underprovided both by market mechanisms (because of the impossibility of excluding non-payers from using the services) and by government-run systems...

We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a country consisting of a large number of heterogeneous regions, each comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighbouring district,...

We model club formation as a non-cooperative game of coalition formation and surplus division. We show how social norms and individual rationality sustain a particular form of collective inefficiency, namely excessive entry in the joint production and exploitation of an excludable good. We term...

The analysis of common goods needs to look very carefully at the characteristics of the goods and of the social situations of their provision. Different characteristics lead to different strategic constellations and therefore to different opportunities for institutional solutions to the problems...

Capital tax competition is analyzed in a model with a single private and a locally supplied public consumption good. As a benchmark case necessary conditions for efficient interregional tax structures are derived and contrasted with the outcome of beggar thy neighbor strategies. If households...

Earlier studies estimating the demand for local public services by means of the median voter model have typically assumed exogenous regressors and static set-ups. Furthermore, the commonly used log-linear specification of the demand function has in most cases not been supported by a well-defined...

The paper reports the results of three stated preference surveys in urban-rural areas in Northern England. The objective is that of valuing the economic benefits from traffic calming schemes in two areas with different traffic problems from stated preference observations. Both choice-experiments...