Tiebout's basic claim was that when public goods are local, competition between jurisdictions solves the free riding problem in the sense that equilibria exist and are always Pareto efficient. Unfortunately, the literature does not quite support this conjecture. For finite economies, one must...

This paper studies how to design a fiscal constitution that protects future generations from expropriation and generates optimal investment in intergenerational public goods. We study how to accomplish these goals by changing the level of government to which different types of intergenerational...

If one assumes that voters are rational, the most plausible explanation for high voter turnouts seems to be that agents receive benefits from the act of voting itself. We show that public-spirited agents have an evolutionary advantage over those who are not as public-spirited for a range of...

We consider a general equilibrium local public goods economy in which agents have two distinguishing characteristics. The first is 'crowding type', which is publicly observable and provides direct costs or benefits to the jurisdiction (coalition or firms) the agent joins. The second is taste...

This paper provides an explanation for the common observation that higher income neighborhoods typically receive better public services compared with lower income neighborhoods. Intuitively, one might expect that lower income groups, which usually form the voting majority of cities, would object...

The infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma has a multiplicity of Pareto-unranked equilibria. This leads to a battle of the sexes problem of coordinating on a single efficient outcome. One natural method of achieving coordination is for the players to bargain over the set of possible equilibrium...