The nature of the collective ownership may make it easier for the local governments to purse private benefits from the return of the public investments on the collective operation. This may lead to disproportionate allocation of public funds to favour collective-owned operation as opposed to...

Mass media plays a crucial role in information distribution and thus in the political market and public policy making. Theory predicts that information provided by mass media reflects the media’s incentives to provide news to different types of groups in society, and affects these groups’...

The US government spending allocation database provides new data on a set of disaggregated government spending categories covering all the states in the US for the period 1983-2008. The data allows for the comparison of federal versus state and local government spending over time on various...

The body of theoretical and empirical research that objectively addresses the problem of corruption has grown considerably in recent years (Elliot 1997; Coolidge and Rose-Ackerman 1997; Gill 1998; Girling 1997; HDC 1999; Kaufmann and Sachs 1998; Mauro 1995; Paul and Guhan 1997; Shleifer and Vishnay 1998; Stapenhurst and Kpundeh 1998;...

Conventional economic theory suggests that economists' contribution to local government is primarily with respect to the production function type of knowledge. A characterization of local government decision making exposes some limitations on applicability of economic analysis of that kind....