This paper analyses J.S. Mill's theory on the relationships between individual autonomy and State powers. It will be argued that there is a significant discrepancy between Mill's general liberal statements aimed to secure individual largest possible autonomy and the specific examples which...

Public firms are public economic units that take location decisions or are involved in such decisions. There is a lack of location theories that consider this feature. The literature on public facility location theory mainly concerns location of real capital serving economic units. Attempts to...

Why do politicians redistribute resources through in-kind rather than cash transfers? This paper examines political incentives for in-kind government redistribution. By analyzing the political game between office-motivated politicians and self-interested citizens, I first show that in economies...

The decision oriented theory of the public firm (Feng, Friedrich 2013) becomes extended. The authors consider that sometimes public firms compete horizontally as well. This can be due to competition among the public owners (e.g. municipalities) considering location choices for public firms they...

We collect information about more than 5,000 Prussian politicians, digitize administrative data on the provision of health-promoting public goods, and gather local-level information on workers' movements to study why elites in industrializing countries implement policies that improve the health...

We provide a theory of political clientelism, which explains sources and determinants of political clientelism, the relationship between clientelism and elite capture, and their respective consequences for allocation of public services, welfare, and empirical measurement of government...

Finnish municipalities enjoy ample fiscal autonomy and provide or arrange the provision of a large share of public services. In recent years, their spending and debt has been increasing steadily, especially because of population ageing and increases in the cost of health care and social...

Like in most other European countries, services of general interest in Finland have in recent years been subject to competition, increased private provision, and in some cases privatisation. This development is motivated by expected cost reductions, by EU regulations, by ideology and fashion,...

We consider a model in which business public services must be financed with either a source-based tax on mobile capital, such as a property tax, or a tax on production, such as an origin-based VAT and assess which of the two tax instruments is more efficient. In general, both a capital tax and a...