We characterize Markov-perfect equilibria in a setting where the absence of government commitment affects the financing of productive public capital. We show that at any date, a government in office only considers intertemporal distortions over two consecutive periods in choosing taxes. We then...

The primary objective of this paper is to highlight the distinct roles of altruism and of self-interest in the political determination of a public education policy. I assess the relative importance of three factors in the determination of the equilibrium level of this policy: altruism, the...

Some economic models like the cash-in-advance model of money have the property that the dynamics are ill-defined going forward in time, but well-defined going backward in time. In this paper, we apply the theory of inverse limits to characterize topologically all possible solutions to a dynamic...

While federal financial intermediation in widely accepted, federal provision of finance was not one of the original powers of the federal government. Federal financial intermediation began during WW I through the War Finance Corporation (WFC). When the Wilson administration wanted to end the...

Resources to fight the War for Independence from Great Britain (1775-1783) were to be provided to the U.S. Congress by the individual states based on each state’s population share in the united colonies. Congressional spending, however, largely flowed to where the theater of war was located....

This paper reports the results of a study of the impact of government expenditures on economic growth, emphasizing how government effectiveness in developing nations influences the productivity of government spending. The effects of categories of government spending on growth are also examined....

The two global international financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, frequently, and often repeatedly, extend loans to developing nations. Recently, these loans have been blamed for generating adverse economic outcomes. An empirical growth model, which...

The relationship between government size and the unemployment rate is investigated using an error-correction model that describes both the short-run dynamics and long-run determination of the unemployment rate. Using data from twenty OECD countries from 1970 to 1999 and after correcting for...

This paper deals with the effects of the geographic concentration of economic activity on productivity through agglomeration economies in the U.S. economy. Our empirical study extends the literature on agglomeration economies in two directions. First we measure and compare the effects on...

Conventional discrete choice Random Utility Maximization (RUM) models of recreation demand ignore the influence of knowledge, or site capital, gained over past trips on current site choice, despite its obvious impact. We develop a partially dynamic RUM model that incorporates a measure of site...