In fiscal interaction, a policy is evolutionarily stable if, once adopted by all governments, jurisdictions that deviate from it fare worse than those that stick to it. Evolutionary stability is the appropriate solution concept for models of imitative learning (policy mimicking). We show that...

In fiscal interaction, a policy is evolutionarily stable if, once adopted by all governments, jurisdictions that deviate from it fare worse than those that stick to it. Evolutionary stability is the appropriate solution concept for models of imitative learning (policy mimicking). We show that...

Public employment grew surprisingly fast in Russia during the 1990s, at a time when total employment was falling. Most of this growth occurred in the country's 89 regions, and rates varied among them. This paper seeks to explain this variation. Using panel data for 78 regions over 1992-1998 we...

More than two years after the official end of the Great Recession, state governments still face significant budget deficits that cannot be addressed without further drastic spending cuts or substantial revenue increases. The structural origins of the ongoing state fiscal crisis are well known....

Although whether there is political influence on distributive policies is now indisputable, important debates have emerged about how politics distorts distributive policy outcomes. In this article, the authors improve the understanding of distributive politics by focusing on South Korea. They...

This paper analyzes empirically the coalition formation of local governments. We introduce a novel econometric strategy involving choice based sampling from a spatial network to allow for multi-partner mergers in our empirical analysis. We apply our method to recent municipality mergers in...

This report reviews the Commonwealth of Virginia’s secondary road policy in order to identify options for revising policy to improve the condition and operation of the secondary system in light of continuing reductions in secondary construction and maintenance budgets

Does reapportionment in a legislature affect policy outcomes? We examine this question from a comparative perspective by focusing on reapportionment associated with the electoral reform in Japan. First, we show that the reform of 1994 resulted in an unprecedented degree of equalization in...

Climate change is seen as the most pressing environmental problem of our time by many companies, policymakers and other stakeholders. It is currently also at the forefront of attention in view of attempts to conclude a successor to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012. In bail-out plans and...