Land in India is problematic largely because of archaic and perverse provisions in the practice and the law. The new Land Acquisition Amendment Bill does go some way to correct the anti-democratic and imperial provisions of the old 1894 Act. Other regulatory restraints stand in the way of fair...

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...

Over the past 20 years, local and regional governments in the Los Angeles metropolitan area have invested significant resources in building rail transit infrastructure that connects major employment centers. One goal of transit infrastructure is to catalyze the development of high density,...

The article explores regional policy issues at the nexus of economic geography and the recent academic literature on the political economy of digitalization. The objective is to blend these two areas of research to derive a first set of preliminary policy implications for so called "Smart...

This paper studies the effect of leadership on the level and evolution of pro-social behavior using an artefactual field experiment on local public good provision. Participants decide how much to contribute to an actual conservation project. They can then revise their donations after being...

This study examines individual and group behavior in a linear appropriation game setting. Subjects make decisions from a menu of eight games, without feedback. Four treatment conditions vary the magnitude of the opportunity cost of conservation, including symmetric and asymmetric treatments. A...

Traditionally economic theory assumes that preferences are stable facilitating positive predictions of economic policy. While there is conflicting experimental evidence on the temporal stability of cooperation preferences in public goods provision, surprisingly little is known about their...

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly efforts while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rankorder tournaments. This survey...