The current paper reveals evidence consistent with social promotion in Ohio's central city public schools. Relative to rural school districts, there is something about central city schools that makes their students perform worse on the state proficiency test. However, this same something makes...

The current paper reveals evidence consistent with social promotion in Ohio's central city public schools. Relative to rural school districts, there is something about central city schools that makes their students perform worse on the state proficiency test. However, this same something makes...

German municipalities are expected to suffer from (often significant) population losses in the upcoming decades. We assess these local governments' vulnerability to the fiscal consequences of this demographic decline through two means (using a sample of 1021 municipalities in the state of...

Capitalization of fiscal packages at the local level is often criticized as a demand side phenomenon. We provide a theoretical model in which capitalization depends on the elasticity of housing supply and demand. When supply is perfectly elastic, capitalization does not persist over time. Using...

The role of government in the process of globalization has been discussed extensively in recent years. The two “rivaling” theories that best reflect conventional wisdom are the “efficiency” and the “compensation” hypothesis. With regard to the compensation hypothesis, I challenge...

We implement a one-week partial sleep restriction protocol to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on joint production in a standard voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) experiment. Additionally, the effect of sleep restriction on an individual's likelihood of sending costly peer...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

This paper analyzes government commitments to ongoing spending programs that require future outlays. Spending commitments are important for understanding partisan politics because they constrain future governments. In a model with one government good, a “stubborn liberal” policy maker can...

The objective of this paper is to explore various relationships between self-reported life satisfaction and state public finance in the U.S. The paper focuses on both government expenditure and revenue (especially tax) structures. This paper is the first of its kind to examine the relationship...

There is a heated debate in the US, Canada and many European countries about introducing universally accessible child care. However, studies on universal child care and child development are scarce and only consider short-run outcomes. We analyze the introduction of universal child care in...