The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that,...

We consider a planner who chooses between two possible public policies and ask whether a referendum or a cost benefit analysis leads to higher welfare. We find that a referendum leads to higher welfare than a cost benefit analyses in "common value" environments. Cost benefit analysis is better...

This paper considers the problem of an imperfectly informed regulator constrained in his choice of environmental regulation by the political opposition of those affected by the policy. We compare the value of two types of information to the regulator: the social cost of pollution and the...

We investigate the relationship between interstate highways and highway vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) in US cities. We find that VKT increases proportionately to highways and identify three important sources for this extra VKT: an increase in driving by current residents; an increase in...

Most exchange of farm land in rural china is conducted by local governments rather than by decentralized land markets. We investigate the forces determining the reallocation behavior of village governments, and hence the formation of the right "security of tenure". We also examine the...

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus increases in the land area used by individual households. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.5%...

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus changes in residential land per household. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.7% while population...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multi-region model of economic geography that we use to understand the general equilibrium implications of transportation...

We evaluate the effect of land use regulation on the value of land and on welfare. Our estimates are based on a decomposition of the effects of regulation into three components: an own‐lot effect, which reflects the cost of regulatory constraints to the owner of a parcel; an external effect,...