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...

Infolge der Regionalisierung von Wirtschafts- und Strukturpolitik entstehen entweder vollkommen neue Institutionen (horizontale Regionalisierung) oder Institutionen mit neuen Kompetenzen (vertikale Regionalisierung). Der Erfolg einer Regionalisierungspolitik läßt sich am Grad der...

Most contemporary decentralization has occurred at the local (district) rather than regional (provincial) level. Why? We advance a theory highlighting the political incentives of central authorities to bypass the regional tier of government in favor decentralizing to smaller, more fragmented...

This paper critically surveys the growing literature on the policy choices of local governments. First, we identify various reasons for local government policy interactions, including fiscal competition, bidding for firms, yardstick competition, expenditure spillovers, and Tiebout sorting. We...

Federalism can be a conflict-prevention mechanism, but some political scientists and economists have also endorsed certain features of the system as being likely to establish proper market incentives for economic growth. Most developing countries have ignored economists' recommendations for...

We study local tax competition when municipalities can voluntarily cooperate. We compare the intensity of interjurisdictional policy interdependence between competing municipalities within the same “establishment for inter-municipal cooperation” (EIMC) and competing municipalities outside of...

We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

Countries differ in their governmental architectures and in the rules that describe the allocation of tasks, rights and duties across the various levels of government. In this paper, we present a short and selective survey of the development of the theory of optimal allocation of rights and...

Recent studies examining the relationship between legislative majorities and state budgets have presented mixed results. We provide new insight on this relationship by employing stochastic frontier analysis to model the maximum potential budgets that could be feasibly produced given a set of...

One of the major goals of libertarianism – and liberalism generally – is expanding political freedom: the opportunity to exercise meaningful choice over the government policies we live under. The main opportunity for political choice in modern liberal democracies is ballot box voting....