Observed fiscal policy varies greatly across time and countries. How can we explain this variation across time and countries? This paper surveys the recent literature that has tried to answer this question. We adopt a unified approach in portraying public policy as the equilibrium outcome of an...

Empirical distributions of election margins are computing using data on U.S. Congressional and state legislator election returns. We present some of the first empirical calculations of the frequency of close elections, showing that one of every 100,000 votes cast in U.S. elections, and one of...

Some public goods are provided entirely with private contributions, others with a mixture of public and private funding, and still others are entirely publicly funded. To explain this variation, a model of dual provision is developed that endogenizes public and private funding. Members of the...

This paper explores a series of general-equilibrium models in which people can choose to be either producers or predators, and in which producers can allocate their resources either to production or to guarding their production against predators. The analysis shows how the ratio of predators to...

This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of local public goods. The point of departure is to model a centralized system as one in which public spending is financed by general taxation, but districts can receive different levels of local...

In this article, we examine the effect of the imperfect mobility of goods on international risk sharing and, through that, on the investment in risky projects, welfare and growth. We find that the welfare gain of financial market openness is not monotonic with respect to investors' risk aversion...

The paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of majority rule and Tiebout sorting within a system of local jurisdictions. The idea behind the estimation procedure is to investigate whether observed levels of public expenditures satisfy necessary conditions implied by majority rule in a...