The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public...

The mini-revolution in 1994 that gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in forty years, and which led to the enactment of the Unfunded Mandate Reform Act of 1995 (UMRA) as part of the Contract with America, was designed in part to revive some foundational constitutional...

This Article offers an innovative approach to settling disputes about interjurisdictional externalities. Focusing attention on the negative spillover effects of local government zoning decisions on neighboring jurisdictions, the Article develops a monetary compensation regime intended to enrich...

Oates' decentralization theorem (Oates [20]) grounds on the assumption that the central government is incapable to discriminate public policy on a regional basis. This assumption has sometimes been justified by some informational advantage of local governments about the social and economic...

The paper introduces the concepts of incentive relation and implementation relation, discussing them in the context of agent-principal relationships. The incentives literature relevant to implementation is reviewed, as well as relevant literature on individual behavior in organizations and on...

We study how the historical memories of war affect consumer choices of brands from different country-of-origins in the context of the Chinese automotive market. Our research design exploits two natural experiments: (i) the Imperial Japanese Army's Continental Cross-Through Operation in 1944 in...

Numerous cities across the U.S. have recently switched to ranked choice voting in their local mayoral elections. Proponents argue that, by allowing voters to fully express their preferences over the candidates, voter satisfaction and, ultimately, turnout will improve. Opponents are concerned...

The Japanese Ministry of Environment is promoting green purchasing policies across all levels of Japanese government. A primary reason is that green purchasing policies have the potential to significantly reduce carbon impacts across the globe and can help Japan achieve its carbon emissions...

Adaptation by cities is critical in reducing the inevitable impact of climate change. Here we present the first large-sample evidence of cities' adaptation to elevated flood risk, a key consequence of climate change. We construct and analyze a new linguistic measure of adaptation extracted from...

This paper investigates whether elite interconnections contribute to unethical behavior. It aims to present a clear explanation of how these connections are established, analyze the presence of unethical conduct within them, and assess their impact on the economy and societal welfare. This paper...