Innovations in government produce positive externalities for other jurisdictions. Theory therefore predicts that local government will tend to produce a lower than optimal amount of innovation, as officials will prefer to free-ride on innovation by others. As Susan Rose-Ackerman observed in...

The Porter hypothesis holds that appropriate environmental regulation creates a win-win situation for the simultaneous, coordinated development of the environment and the economy in a certain locale. To open the black box of the Porter hypothesis in the Chinese context, this paper considers...

Decentralised experimentation and mutual learning of public policies is seen as one of the important advantages of federal systems (Oates: laboratory federalism). Based upon Hayekian ideas of the advantages of decentralised experimentation (as a discovery procedure), we analyse the long-term...