The competitive, market-based economy and adversarial legal system in the U.S. encourage strategic behavior and decision-making. This system often yields positive economic results. The system has a dark side, however, since strategic and unethical actors exploit the high costs of the legal...

Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) is a ubiquitous reality. In Africa, the wave of PPP has hit states in their infancy – still moulding following only 50 years since independence. The common perspective of PPP on the realms of scholarship is transactional (focused on the delivery-end of...

This paper examines the claim that ethnic heterogeneity reduces government spending on various local public goods. Our analysis suggests that higher ethnic heterogeneity does not necessarily reduce local public spending due to two factors: (1) the low price elasticity of demand for local public...

The relationship between neighborhood physical environment and social disorder, particularly crime, is of critical interest to urban economists and sociologists, as well as local governments. Over the past 50 years, various policy interventions to improve physical conditions in distressed...

In this study, we argue that the rules set by a central government to allocate interregional equalization grants may induce richer regions to ask for devolution, even when centralized provision is more efficient. We model a local public good with spillovers in a framework in which devolution is...

Over the past 20 years, California has made substantial investments in intra-metropolitan passenger rail infrastructure, expanding existing systems and building new ones. According to advocates of New Urbanism, such investment should encourage the growth of mixed-use transit-oriented...

This paper develops a new measure of state and local fiscal sustainability called the "trend gap," which is based on socioeconomic and other fundamental factors and removes the short-term influence of the business cycle. The paper estimates the trend gap and finds that the nationwide per capita...

This paper attends to institutional challenges Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) faces in its attempt to capture private finance for transport infrastructure management. The paper starts with an exposition of the state of the road network in SSA, identifying a major gap in investment. This gap is partly...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) needs to invest 1.5-2.0 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on roads annually, over at least five years, which amounts to typically a threefold increase in spending. Otherwise the road network will continue to pose a major impediment to achieving the first goal...

Reflecting recent enforcement policy activism of US states, this paper examines federal-state overlap of illegal immigration policy in a spatial context. Keeping the US-Mexico context in mind, we assume that labor from a source nation enters a host nation through bordering states. Once in the...