We study how trade protection varies with the electoral rules for legislative representation. In particular, we investigate different hypotheses about why trade policy differs between countries with legislatures elected by a plurality election rule in single member constituencies and...

This paper characterizes the consequences of introducing the public provision of intergenerational goods to the elderly in a model with endogenous fertility. With exogenous fertility, it has been shown that the government can mandate the first-best outcome by simply imposing the socially optimal...

We study the effect of different school choice mechanisms on schools' incentives for quality improvement. To do so, we introduce the following criterion: A mechanism respects improvements of school quality if each school becomes weakly better off whenever that school becomes more preferred by...

This paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the United States to estimate the causal impact of inter-jurisdictional competition on income growth. We find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17% increase in the average annual...

We develop a quality competition model to understand how price controls affect market outcomes in buyer-seller markets with discrete goods of varying quality. While competitive equilibria do not necessarily exist in such markets when price controls are imposed, we show that stable outcomes do...

We introduce a model in which agents in a network can trade via bilateral contracts. We find that when continuous transfers are allowed and utilities are quasi-linear, the full substitutability of preferences is sufficient to guarantee the existence of stable outcomes for any underlying network...

Hatfield and Milgrom (2005) present a unified model of matching with contracts phrased in terms of hospitals and doctors, which subsumes the standard two-sided matching and some package auction models. They show that a stable allocation exists if contracts are substitutes for each hospital. They...

We revisit the classic problem of tax competition in the context of federal nations, and derive a positive theory of partial decentralization. A capital poor median voter wants to use capital taxes to provide public goods. This results in redistributive public good provision. As a consequence,...

We show that Ricardian equivalence holds for local public finance if and only if subnational units use property taxes. However, for other tax bases, the unique equilibrium has the same economic outcome as in models where districts may not issue debt.

Hatfield and Milgrom [Hatfield, John William, Milgrom, Paul R., 2005. Matching with contracts. Amer. Econ. Rev. 95, 913-935] present a unified model of matching with contracts, which includes the standard two-sided matching and some package auction models as special cases. They show that the...