Since the inception of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program in 1975, cities and large urban counties have been entitled to funding based on a formula designed to approximate community need. As with any such federally funded and locally administered program, there is a tension...

Our model illustrates how political institutions trade off between the competing goals of representation and governance, where governance is the responsiveness of an institution to a single pivotal voter. We use exogenous variation from the 30-year history of the federal Community Development...