In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the...

This article argues that New York municipalities should integrate land banks into the tax enforcement process to break the unhealthy cycle perpetuated by real estate and lien speculators. By transferring all tax liens and foreclosed properties to local land banks, municipalities can generate an...

O'Hara G. (2005) A journey without maps: the regional policies of the 1964-70 British Labour Government, Regional Studies 39 , 1183-1195. This paper examines four influences on British regional policy in the late 1960s: party politics in the context of the economic environment; the structure of...

Although regional resources have been shown to influence secessionist conflicts in developing countries, their effect in established democracies has largely been neglected. We integrate regional resource value and inter-regional transfers in a model on the optimal size of nations, and show that...

I discuss correlations between the historical growth of social capabilities and patterns of economic growth across world regions since the industrial revolution and especially in recent decades. Based on this analysis, I argue that the apparent relationship between institutions and economic...

We contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes. Recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical advantages suggests that path dependence cannot be understood as the medium-run effect of legacy capital but...

Ensuring and maintaining staff competitiveness on the national and international level, the quantification of effective ways of enhancing competitive advantages of the national economy, are crucial strategies for socio-economic development of world countries. This article investigates the...

We contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes. Recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical advantages suggests that path dependence cannot be understood as the medium-run effect of legacy capital but...

Our paper extends the capital tax competition literature by incorporating heterogeneous capital and agglomeration. Our model nests the standard tax competition model as well as the special case in which there is agglomeration but no firm/capital heterogeneity and the opposite case, firm...

The European economic integration leads to increasing mobility of factors, thereby threatening the stability of social transfer programs. This paper investigates the possibility to achieve by means of voluntary matching grants both the optimal allocation of factors and the optimal level of...