This paper provides an empirical test of a principal tenet of fiscal federalism: that spending discretion, when granted to localities, leads to public-sector heterogeneity, with public-good levels adjusting to suit local demands. The test is based on a simple model of partial fiscal...

This paper provides theory and evidence on airline bag fees, offering insights into a real-world case of product unbundling. The theory predicts that an airline’s fares should fall when it introduces a bag fee, but that the full trip price (the bag fee plus the new fare) could either rise or...

This paper analyzes cordon tolling using a simple model where space is discrete rather than continuous, with commuting costs incurred only on two congested bridges. The first-best regime requires tolls on both bridges, whereas only the inner bridge is tolled under the cordon-toll regime. While...

This paper investigates strategic interaction among airlines in product-quality choices. Using an instrumental variables approach, the paper estimates flight-frequency reaction functions, which relate an airline’s frequency on a route to its own characteristics and to the frequencies of...

This paper shows that the inefficiency of fiscal decentralization in the presence of spillovers, a main tenet of the decentralization literature, is overturned in a particular transportation context. In a monocentric city where road (bridge) capacity is financed by budget-balancing user fees,...

Lectures on Urban Economics offers a rigorous but nontechnical treatment of major topics in urban economics. To make the book accessible to a broad range of readers, the analysis is diagrammatic rather than mathematical. Although nontechnical, the book relies on rigorous economic reasoning. In...

Much of the literature on the economics of mortgage markets has studied the FRM-ARM choice made by individual borrowers. However, to decide if the outcome of such a choice is efficient or approximately so, it is necessary to explore the question of optimal risk-sharing in mortgage contracts. But...