It has been argued that organizations which are unable to directly appropriate any of the firm's residual earnings tend to experience various forms of wealth-taking by managers (Alchian and Kessel, 1962). This wealth-taking has been observed in privately-owned, regulated firms (Nelson, 1980) as...

We have found that the fiscal power of a city can be increased by extension of its borders within a land area that is homogeneous with respect to earning opportunities, even when numerous rival jurisdictions exist in the area. We hypothesized that extending municipal boundaries will have a...

The empirical literature on the publicness of local government services has observed no significant degree of publicness. It is difficult to reconcile these findings with Wyckoff's conclusion that bureaucrats prefer pure public goods. Wyckoff's solution is to suggest that bureaucracy has little...

The empirical results of this paper are derived from a monopoly view of local government decisionmaking in contrast to the competitive view offered by earlier researchers. That our results are similar to earlier findings lends additional support to the conclusion that local output is largely...

Dwight Lee (1989) argues on utilitarian grounds that the minimal state of classical liberalism cannot be both desirable and feasible: if desirable, it is not attainable; if attainable, it is not desirable. Lee's article provides an intriguing new perspective on the long debate about the optimal...

While no claim is made that reverse revenue sharing is, even from a private interest perspective, the best fiscal arrangement, it has been argued that it represents an improvement over current arrangements in important ways. Still, reverse revenue sharing surely will be seen by most as a rather...

We examine whether nations, faced with the threat of terrorism, will be motivated to engage in the efficient amount of retaliation against terrorists. We demonstrate that the problem confronting the efforts of nations to achieve an optimal retaliation against terrorists is understated by the...

The amount of control the general public exerts over government depends on accepted government procedures as determined by the political constitution and prevailing public opinion. It has not been the purpose of this paper to suggest ways of providing the public more control over government but...