Provides empirical evidence of the relationship between the structure of the local public goods market and the relative size of the local public sector. Market structure is measured with respect to both the degree of fragmentation and an index of concentration.

This paper uses new data on school district capital stocks, stochastic frontier analysis, and a value-added measure of school quality to provide the first direct evaluation of the relationship between school facilities and school district costs. We find that the cost of education increases as...

We report the results of a laboratory experiment on crowd-out in a voluntary contribution mechanism public goods game. In our setting, a standard argument states that a tax should not be effective in raising contributions, because agents respond by reducing voluntary contributions by the amount...

Data envelopment analysis or DEA is a standard methodology for assessing technical efficiency. In many DEA applications, e.g. in the case of schools or hospitals, the issue arises of calculating efficiency in the presence of nondiscretionary/environmental inputs. We propose a three-stage DEA...