This paper analyses the costs and benefits of being a capital or central municipality, where central costs are understood to be incurred specifically as a result of the problems large municipalities located at the centre of an urban agglomeration face and capital costs are understood to result...

Schools are essential in forming human capital and in improving the long-term health of the economy. They are also heavily reliant on state and local funds, which were severely depleted during the Great Recession. To alleviate some of the strain on local budgets, the federal government passed...

Regions are increasingly competing indirectly because of the increasing mobility of populations. According to OECD (2005) figures, interregional commuting rates are high. Intraregional commuting rates are even higher and steadily increasing. Commuting has a significant influence on the income of...

This paper aims to listen and understand the voices of the self-employed workers of a shrinking traditional iron kitchen utensil making microenterprise cluster based at Patardih village of Deoghar district in state of Jharkhand in India. The point of view of these self-employed workers have been...

Modern law sets “public” local government law apart from “private” business entities law. Although intuitive, this distinction ignores legal history and, even more troublingly, the contemporary practices of local governments. Due to distressed finances and a political atmosphere favoring...

This article presents findings from the HMDA data through 2016. The number of mortgage originations in 2016 rose 13 percent from 2015. Black and Hispanic white borrowers increased their share of home-purchase loans for the third straight year. The share of mortgages originated by nondepository,...

This research examined social impact investment (SII) in social and affordable housing in Australia. It considered US and UK models, together with interviews with government experts, social impact investors and not-for-profit housing providers, to inform the analysis. In Australia, the funding...

Economic theory suggests that bond issuers of lower credit quality or higher opacity should be more likely to issue bonds with premium coupons (higher coupon rates relative to yields at issuance). Using a comprehensive data set of municipal bonds issued between 1992 and 2012 by more than 21,000...

In the early 1990s, a widely shared opinion among scholars and practitioners was that the importance of physical proximity between banks and borrowers would be doomed to decrease drastically over time and, put in extreme terms, the end of banking geography would become a real possibility....

The majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa does not have a basic bank account and are financially excluded from main stream financial services. This paper examines factors that drive geographic exclusion of banking services to rural communities and households' demand for a basic bank account...