In this paper, we explore how the ability of bureaucrats to extract resources from their community may be limited by competition in the local market for public goods. Specifically, we examine intergovernmental aid as a resource bureaucrats seek to control. Intergovernmental aid has been found to...

An assumption of the post-World War II metropolitan reform movement was that fragmentation of metropolitan regions into multiple local governments was wasteful and inefficient, increasing the cost and size of government. More recently, ‘polycentrists’ have argued that the competition between...