Research on zoning typically assumes city planners aim to maximize housing prices with their land use decisions, either explicitly for public choice reasons or implicitly through the approval of land uses that create local net benefits. Noncongruence of school district and municipality borders...

School district and municipal borders do not always align. Non-congruent borders can create a fiscal commons problem where new development does not entirely "pay its way." In response, frustrated citizens often respond by voting for lower school spending. Using GIS data on Ohio school districts,...

Many young economists become bogged down in the first few years of teaching because they have had neither the time nor the experience nor the mentoring to think through and develop how best to structure their syllabus. By 'syllabus structure'the authors do not mean which readings are assigned,...

Purpose While many studies find a positive relationship between economic freedom and entrepreneurship, very few of these studies account for possible spatial autocorrelation. Moreover, the development of an overall freedom measure has allowed researchers to test the relationship between overall...

Purpose Congress passed the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, vesting the Securities and Exchange Commission with the clear legal authority to prosecute members of Congress (politicians) if they engage in insider trading. This paper aims to investigate whether members...

Purpose: What information do members of Congress (politicians) use when they trade stocks? The purpose of this paper is to attempt to answer this question by investigating the relationship between an aggregate measure of trading by members of Congress (aggregate congressional trading) and...

The international development community has encouraged investment in physical and human capital as a precursor to economic progress. Recent evidence shows, however, that increases in capital do not always lead to increases in output. We develop a growth model where the allocation and...

This paper investigates the political economy of military base closure in the United States. The Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Act was passed in 1988 in an attempt to insulate base closure and realignment from politic influence. The political pressure to influence the process remains...