This paper proposes and empirically tests a new demand-side explanation for distortions in public spending composition. Voters prefer spending with certain and immediate benefits when they have low trust in electoral promises and high discount rates. The paper incorporates these characteristics...

Recent empirical work in public finance uses the housing price response to public investments to assess the efficiency of local durable public good provision. This paper investigates the theoretical foundations for this technique. In the context of a novel theoretical model developed to study...

This paper employs Roback's locational-equilibrium model of public-goods pricing, cross-sectional data from the Census of Population and Housing, and SMSA-level estimates of public capital stocks in order to examine the productive contribution of public capital. I find that public capital has a...

We empirically analyze the effect of political support for the government on voluntary tax compliance. To this end, we use 33 survey results of the contingent valuation (CV) method developed and widely used for the valuation of non-market goods in the field of environmental economics. The degree...

We model investors that take into account the amount of public good that firms produce (e.g., by reducing carbon emissions) when making their portfolio allocation. In an equilibrium asset pricing model with production and public goods provision, we find that environmentally conscious investors...

Mobilising private institutional investors to fund global biodiversity goals has become a hegemonic narrative within environmental policy and sustainable finance circles. We challenge its underlying economic assumptions and question the deprioritisation of direct public investment in nature....