This paper studies the provision of public inputs in a federal system. A vertical tax externality is also considered in a simple general equilibrium model used to analyze the efficiency of equilibria under different scenarios. The results show that the state provision of public inputs may affect...

Reflecting recent enforcement policy activism of US states, this paper examines federal-state overlap of illegal immigration policy in a spatial context. Keeping the US-Mexico context in mind, we assume that labor from a source nation enters a host nation through bordering states. Once in the...

There is much evidence against the so-called too big to fail hypothesis in the case of bailouts to sub-national governments. We look at a model where districts of different size provide local public goods with positive spillovers. Matching grants of a central government can induce...

Due to the high transaction cost that would be necessary for large numbers of people to negotiate with each other, even those who are sanguine about private markets become reserved when externalities affect large populations. The distinction between private and societal interest is well...

We develop a simple model of fiscal competition among ageing municipalities. When ageing advances, gerontocracies and social planners gradually substitute publicly provided goods aimed at the mobile young population for publicly provided goods for the elderly. This substitution process does not...

We specify a flexible general framework of the effect of municipality size on the provision of an excludable public good. The model accounts for demand side factors which affect the quality of the public good. Previous literature has recognized that municipality size should have a non-linear...

A substantial and diverse literature in economics traces its intellectual roots to Charles Tiebout's 1956 article, "The Pure Theory of Local Expenditure." Its present recognition frequently attributed to originating the idea of "voting with your feet," however, contrasts sharply with its...

We develop a simple model of fiscal competition among ageing municipalities. When ageing advances, gerontocracies and social planners gradually substitute publicly provided goods aimed at the mobile young population for publicly provided goods for the elderly. This substitution process does not...

Court decisions in the past twenty years such as Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Mount Laurel Associated, as well as recent legislation, have made exclusionary zoning laws based on race illegal and have limited, at least in many states, the legality of exclusionary zoning based on income....

This paper builds spatial microfoundations for the functional forms used in the analysis of inter-jurisdictional public spending spillovers. It introduces a symmetric bilateral model that distinguishes between three stages: production of multiple public inputs (intermediary goods), production of...