In order to understand inefficient institutions, one needs to understand what mightcause the breakdown of a political version of the Coase Theorem. This paper considersan environment populated by ex-ante identical agents and develops a model of powerand distribution where institutions (the...

Public choice analysts have often argued that the level of government spending willreflect voter-taxpayer’s demand for public goods, while the fiscal illusion literature hasargued that certain features of the tax structure affect voter’s perceptions of their taxburden causing them to...

We suggest an alternative way of analyzing the canonical Bergstrom-Blume-Varian model of non-cooperative voluntary contributions to a public goodthat avoids the proliferation of dimensions as the number of players is in-creased. We exploit this approach to analyze models in which the...

We present a rigorous, yet elementary, demonstration of the existence of a uniqueLindahl equilibrium under the assumptions that characterize the standard n-player public goodmodel. Indeed, our approach, which exploits the aggregative structure of the public goodmodel, lends itself to a...

We examine whether an economy can have a bad (small or no formal sector, hightaxes) as well as a good (small or no informal sector, low taxes) equilibrium...

Modelling infrastructure as an international public good in a two-country modelof trade where each country’s social planner behaves strategically, we showthat the equilibrium levels of infrastructure are sub-optimal from a globalperspective...

This paper examines the impact of public and private agricultural research andextension on agricultural total factor productivity at the state level. We test the hypothesis thatthe composition of agricultural experiment station funding—share of funding from impact offederal competitive grants...

Some investment advisors offer multiple versions of a fund with the same manager and highlycorrelated returns. But these “twin” funds are separate portfolios for different investors withdiffering abilities to select and monitor managers. Using a matched sample of retail andinstitutional twin...

[...]This article examines the origins and early development ofthe Federal Reserve’s book-entry system—the system mostclosely associated with the elimination of definitive, orcertificated, Treasury securities. We suggest that the Fed’ssystem was the product of three important factors: the...