Fundraisers often start their campaigns by soliciting the wealthier, more recognized and respected individuals in a community. We examine whether an explanation for such a solicitation ordering may be that people prefer to associate with those of higher social ranking than themselves. Using a...

It is well established that the provision of a pure public good is increasing in group size if the good is normal. What I show is that if the good exhibits even a small degree of rivalry, then the individual level of consumption of the public good falls to 0 in a large group. Thus, a strong...

This paper analyzes congestion effects on network situations from a cooperative game theoretic perspective. In network situations players have to connect themselves to a source. Since we consider publicly available networks any group of players is allowed to use the entire network to establish...

We show that federalism will lead to higher economic growth. We present a model of endogenous growth where government services, funded by income and capital taxes, are a component of production. In this model a decentralized government will choose tax policy to maximize economic growth, while a...

Tragedy of the human commons is a special case of tragedy of the commons in which the common resource is composed of human beings. Because humans, unlike trees or fish, behave strategically and because the welfare of humans, unlike that of trees or fish, matters for its own sake, tragedy of the...

We extend the collective model of household behavior to allow for the existence of public consumption. We show how this model allows the analysis of welfare consequences of policies aimed at changing the distribution of power within the household. Our setting provides a conceptual framework for...

Theodore Roosevelt used the US military to create what he called quot;civilized societies.quot; A growing literature focuses on the economic benefits of empires, benefits sometimes referred to as quot;global public goodsquot;. Some authors, such as Mitchener and Weidenmier (2005) and Ferguson...

This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of...

We develop a model that allows for public goods and status signaling through charitable contributions. This model provides a unified framework in which contributions are driven both by altruism and status signaling. We use this setup to re-examine the conventional practice of rendering a...

Blomquist and Christensen (2005) argue that welfare is initially decreasing in the price of an excludable public good and that the case for a positive price for an excludable public good price is weak. We argue that this result follows from their particular characterization of the public good...