Many local governments have reacted to sprawl by adopting urban containment policies to limit fringe growth and encourage core development. An alternative is to design impact fee programs that account for the higher costs of providing services to remote locations. Zone-based impact fee programs...

While administrative resources are thought to generate positive impacts on local economic conditions, most existing investigations of this relationship suffer from endogeneity concerns. Exploiting China’s Relocation Reform policies, we estimate the causal impacts of construction of new...

In 2003, China launched the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), a public healthcare plan targeting rural households. While the literature mostly considers the impact of NCMS coverage on health outcomes, we investigate potential impacts on labor supply and household savings levels. To mitigate...

We formally demonstrate the prisoners' dilemma fueling the incentives "arms race." Our simple game (1) includes only localities that are equivalent with respect to basic location requirements; and (2) explicitly models business climate. Localities are compelled to offer incentives despite...

This is the Presidential Address at the 2006 Annual Meetings of the Southern Regional Science Association, March 30-April 1, St. Augustine, Florida. It discusses the status of fiscal decentralization in the academic literature and as a matter of policy focus. Although fiscal decentralization is...

State and local governments have embraced their authority to offer economic development incentives for the purpose of attracting, retaining, or enhancing economic activity within their borders. Collectively, these programs represent an enormous, but largely overlooked, transfer of wealth from...

Many state legislatures grant local governments the authority to enact sales taxes on retail sales transactions that occur within local jurisdictions. Local government reliance on these local option sales tax (LOST) revenues is increasing. In many states, including Oklahoma, municipal...