Affordable housing is on the minds of voters and state and local officials across the country. One policy often proposed to temper high rents is rent control. In its most basic form rent control is a government-imposed cap on rent and using it as a means of keeping rents below the market rate is...

We use the model developed by Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny (1991) to examine the causal relationship between institutions as measured by economic freedom and industry employment, and then given the causality, examine how the amount of employment in these causal industries influences economic...

Oates' (1972) decentralization theorem holds that local governments will do a superior job at providing the efficient quantity of public goods. Brennan and Buchanan (1980) suggest that "the potential for fiscal exploitation varies inversely with the number of competing governmental units in the...

There has been an international trend towards shifting the provision of public services down to lower levels of government. That decentralization has increased the relative importance of local governments. This paper examines the relationship between spending by those local governments and...

The Economic Freedom of North America (EFNA) index, which ranks the states, was first produced in 2002 and has been updated annually since 2010. The 2016 report was its twelfth edition. The EFNA index has been cited in over 200 academic articles, book chapters, and policy papers. We provide an...

This paper provides the first examination of the relationship between eminent domain activity and the growth (and level) of state and local revenue. We restrict our attention to takings that are for private use, such as the one that led to the landmark Kelo decision in 2005. One of the arguments...

This case examines the issues surrounding the expansion of utility services for a Florida city. Students are required to examine alternative financing options available and the economic impact and hardship that citizens from different regions of the city will potentially bear under alternative...