Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

Pigou (1920) advocated for taxes, set equal to marginal damages, on goods produced and consumed that involve negative externalities. Samuelson (1954) laid out the conditions for optimal pure public goods provision, but noted that free-riding (the “demand revelation” problem) was likely to...

A model of the optimal speed limit is developed which explicitly recognizes the role of average speed, speed variance, and the level of enforcement. An unusual result emerges, namely that a higher speed limit may be optimal when reducing the variance in highway speeds reduces accident externalities

As with other public goods lacking strong special interest support, global climate policy suffers from two serious theoretical flaws. The first is failure to endogenize the labor-leisure decision when conducting benefit-cost analysis. Recognition that income generated will not remain the same...

The linked nature of long-term patterns of urban deconcentration and regional change (from rustbelt to sunbelt) is analyzed in a framework that emphasizes heterogeneous human preferences. The focus is on the important interactions that exist between local and regional amenities, whether...

The paper did not originally have an abstract. It explores the robustness of hedonic pricing estimation, focusing on four areas: 1) variable selection and treatment, 2) measurement error, 3) functional form, and 4) error distribution. The paper offers insights to guide the future conduct of...

Election fraud can threaten democracy if many ineligible people are allowed to vote. The usual policy prescription is to increase monitoring cost. However, this is very costly. This paper proposes a more cost effective strategy: substitute tougher and consistent statutes across states against...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...