We develop a political economy model of intergovernmental transfers. Vertical fiscal balance occurs in a federation when the ratio of the marginal benefit of the public services provided by the federal and provincial governments is equal to their relative marginal costs of production. With...

This paper examines the role of institutions of territorial representation in shaping long-term patterns of inter-regional redistribution within federations. A simple legislative bargaining model with endogenous taxation suggests that over-represented states should be favored in the distribution...

While conventional wisdom holds that partisan bias in U.S. legislative elections results from intentional partisan and racial gerrymandering, we demonstrate that substantial bias can also emerge from patterns of human geography. We show that in many states, Democrats are inefficiently...