Politicians are disciplined through the electoral system. But this is often not enough to eliminate political rents. Economists suggest that competition across governments may also help. But intergovernmental competition can take two forms, through tax competition (exit) or yardstick competition...

Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

Should a subset of member states of a federation be allowed to form a sub-union on some policy issue? When centralization is not politically feasible, allowing an enhanced cooperation agreement among a subset of countries permits the latter to gain benefits which would otherwise be lost....

Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

Politicians are disciplined through the electoral system. But this is often not enough to eliminate political rents. Economists suggest that competition across governments may also help. But intergovernmental competition can take two forms, through tax competition (exit) or yardstick competition...