In the fields of social choice, public choice, and political economics, the key difference between private and political decision-making is whether preferences have to be aggregated to make a decision. A related, yet much less studied difference is whether also beliefs have to be aggregated. In...

We extend a model of wasteful state aid in Dewatripont and Seabright (2006, Journal of the European Economic Association 4, 513--522) by a supranational controlling authority. The model combines moral hazard and adverse selection to show that politicians fund wasteful projects to signal their...

In this paper we examine a class of local crimes that involve perfectly mobile criminals, and perfectly immobile criminal opportunities. We focus on local non-rival crime deterrence that is more efficient against criminals pursuing domestic crimes than criminals pursuing crimes elsewhere. In a...

We measure cost efficiency of 202 Czech municipalities of extended scope in period 2003-2008. The study is the first application of overall efficiency measurement of the local governments in the new EU member states, and the second in post-communist countries. We measure government efficiency...

We examine a symmetric two-district setting with spillovers of local public spending where a spill-in from the foreign spending is not a substitute, but a complement to domestic spending. Specifically, we assume production of two district-specific public goods out of two complementary...

This paper discusses the methodology of quantitative measures of research output. The authors illustrate various approaches to the contentious issue of to how to treat co-authored papers, how to best affiliate migrating authors, and how to quantify the quality of economic periodicals. The...

This paper examines the equilibrium provision of a public good if the private monetary contributions of identical agents are (im)pure complements. To reconcile complementarity in contributions with the apparent substitutability of monetary payments, we assume a setup with multiple inputs into a...

If local public goods exhibit spillovers and regions are sufficiently symmetric, decentralization implies under provision, whereas cooperative centralization is associated with strict Pareto-improvement. This classic inference rests on two assumptions: local politicians are delegated sincerely...