This paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democracies. It extends the citizen-candidate model of democratic policy-making to a dynamic environment. Equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that, in each period, conditional on future policies...

This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods. The point of departure is to model a centralized system as one in which public spending is financed by general taxation, but districts can receive different levels of local...

A key question concerning affirmative action is whether the labor-market gains it brings to minorities can continue without it becoming a permanent fixture in the labor market. The authors argue that this depends on how the policy affects employers' beliefs about the productivity of minority...