We develop an endogenous growth model with public consumption and infrastructure services provided by two-tier governments. Growth performance and welfare implication are compared under the centralized and decentralized fiscal federal systems. In general, there is a trade-off between welfare and...

China's fast growth has been accompanied by rising regional inequality, triggering debate over a policy trade-off between aggregate growth and equity. We set out a three-region model of China in which local government behavior affects local TFP dynamics, and regional inequality itself generates...

Although millions of hectares of public land are transferred to private parties each year, often with unsatisfactory results, evidence on mechanisms to achieve better outcomes is scant. This paper analyzes the impact of a 2021 reform in Ukraine that -after earlier digitization efforts did not...

This paper examines the consequence of decentralization in the management of canal irrigation for spatial allocation of water and agricultural performance. Under centralized management, farmers closer to the canal tend to over-extract water, resulting in spatial mis-allocation. We test whether...

Decentralized insurance can be used to describe risk sharing mechanisms under which participants trade risks among each other as opposed to passing risks mostly to an insurer in traditional centralized insurance. There are a wide range of decentralized practices in all kinds of forms developed...

In the Philippine political dynamics, political patronage has been observed, especially in the local government units. The study’s objectives include determining the different forms of benefits that political patrons offer as observed by local voters, the reasons behind their participation,...

Decentralized taxation and commuting affect numerous dimensions of economic activity, but how they jointly shape residential decisions and spatial income sorting is still not well understood. We develop a structural model of individual location choices in a fiscally decentralized monocentric...

The advent of blockchain, smart contracts, and Web3 has empowered new concepts for equity partnerships with autonomous operating systems and democratic corporate governance. This paper explores 2,377 of such new partnerships and uses detailed transaction data (from 2017 through 2022) to examine...