There are two main forms of government in US cities: council-manager and mayor-council. This paper develops a theory of fiscal policy determination under these two forms. The theory predicts that expected public spending will be lower under mayor-council but that either form of government could...

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 presents a theory of the market provision of broadcasting and uses it to address the nature of market failure in the industry. Equilibrium advertising levels may be too low or too high, depending on the nuisance cost to viewers, the substitutability of programmes, and the expected...