We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. We calculate that a reduction in incarceration rates just to the level we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards) would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9...

We utilize county-level data to explore growth determination in the U.S. and possible heterogeneity in growth determination across individual states. The data includes over 3,000 cross-sectional observations and 39 demographic control variables. We use a consistent two stage least squares...

There has been a growing literature in both the US (for example Haurin and Brasington 1996, and Black 1999) and the UK (for example Gibbons & Machin, 2003) that estimates the way in which school quality is capitalised into house prices. Cheshire and Sheppard 1995 and 1999 estimated hedonic...

This paper relates the processes of strategic planning in London during the first decade of an executive Mayoral system to Doug Yates’ thesis about the ungovernability of major cities and London’s long history of conflict around metropolitan governance issues. Yates’ thesis only partially...

Globalization has a concrete territorial expression, with remaining regional asymmetries. Writers in growth and development are far away to achieve consensus about the underpinning reasons of heterogeneity in regional performance. This constitutes an important regional policy issue. This paper...

Hundreds of studies have failed to establish the effects of decentralisation on a number of important policy goals. This paper examines the cases of Bolivia and Colombia to explore decentralisation’s effects on government responsiveness and poverty-orientation. I first summarize economic data...

Most opportunistic-type models of political business cycles tend to posit a given objective for incumbents: maximisation of re-election chances. Though taking an opportunistic view too, we suggest a new explanation for a fiscal policy cycle: the incumbent’s concern with her own welfare in...

Recent empirical evidence, from countries in the European Union in particular, are much more ambiguous on the costs savings from private production of local public services than previous literature used to be. In this paper, an explanatory model of factors driving costs in solid waste collection...