A pair of municipalities may consolidate services if they are contiguous. Traditional estimation methods assume that each voting process is independent. Instead we propose a new estimation procedure that allows the probability of consolidation to be influenced by neighbouring decisions. We...

Municipalities sometimes retain separate police departments and park services while cooperating in public schooling services with neighboring municipalities. The theoretical model of Ellingsen (Journal of Public Economics, 68, 251-68, 1998) predicts that: (1) under Tiebout sorting, larger size...

School vouchers may increase the competition public school districts face. Greater competition may spur public schools to improve student outcomes, which reliably predict labor market productivity and earnings. Previous school competition studies do not use spatial statistics; they fail to...

Education economists have estimated many education production functions but they have not estimated a supply curve of public school quality. In order to estimate the supply of public school quality, the price of a unit of public schooling must be found. Invoking the theory of implicit markets,...