The traditional fiscal federalism theory shows that the devolution of functions for the supply of local public goods may increase welfare. However, most services offered at local level are impure local public goods with spillovers. These goods have specific characteristics that may prevent...

The process of privatisation of health care has followed different patterns and some health care systems have preferred to create a mixed market where public organisations compete alongside private ones. The evidence on their performance is mixed. In this article we argue that public hospitals...

Since the seminal work of Oates (1972) on fiscal federalism, a central question of public finance has been which level of a federation should be assigned the provision of public goods. In this paper we study the problem of a government that is to choose the optimal...

Health care provision in the public sector is increasingly oriented towards a reduction of vertical integration through fairly heterogeneous methods as concerns the contractual rules and the actors that are allowed to compete. In this paper we model the choice of a benevolent regulator that...

In this paper we compare the properties in terms of rent extraction of Hotelling spatial competition and monopoly franchises using Dutch first price auctions, two of the most widely used tools to regulate public service provision. In a framework where the regulator can imperfectly observe costs,...