Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood. From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decision-making can...

This paper examines the effectiveness of sub-national actions to control a novel disease, such as COVID-19, in the absence of a national policy. Evidence is emerging that countries where subnational governments have undertaken unilateral social distancing measures to combat the pandemic with...

Attempts to measure the capitalization of local taxes into property prices, starting with Oates (1969), have suffered from a lack of local public service controls. We revisit this vast literature with a novel dataset of 947 time-varying local characteristic and public service controls for all...

Attempts to measure the capitalization of local taxes into property prices, starting with Oates (1969), have suffered from a lack of local public service controls. We revisit this vast literature with a novel dataset of 947 time-varying local characteristic and public service controls for all...

Tiebout's classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions, predicting (in the simplest instance) a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities, ordered by household income. In practice, urban areas tend to exhibit varying degrees of...

In many theoretical public finance models, school quality plays a central role as a determinant of household location choices and in turn, of neighborhood stratification. In contrast, the recent empirical literature has almost universally concluded that the direct effect of school quality on...

Recent research links the inequality across countries and regions to colonial institutions. This paper argues that trade shocks could alter the development path of a country or subnational units, in spite of its colonial institutions. This hypothesis is analyzed using state-level data for...

Recent research links the inequality across countries and regions to colonial institutions. This paper argues that trade shocks could alter the development path of a country or subnational units, in spite of its colonial institutions. This hypothesis is analyzed using state-level data for...

Education has long stood at the epicenter of the battle for civil rights. More than half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated schools unlawful in Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunity and achievement gaps based on race, national origin, class, and...

Value-added data are an increasingly common evaluation tool for schools and teachers. Many school districts have adopted these methods and released the results publicly. In this paper, we study the release of value-added data in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Times newspaper to identify how...