nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

reassessment of the tiebout model abstract the tiebout model has been the reference point for the classical approach to fiscal federalism its emphasis on mobility benefit taxation and the advantages of fiscal competition have informed fiscal federalism since the seminal contributions of musgrave and oates this paper reviews the influence that the tiebout model has had on fiscal federalism and argues that while its insights remain relevant for local government it is far from compelling as a positive description of or a normative prescription for fiscal federalism at the state level some aspects of alternative approaches are presented which lead to different perspectives than tiebout inspired ones

a test for efficiency in the supply of public education this paper devises and applies a statistical test for efficient provision of local public education the test is based on the samuelson condition of equality between the sum of marginal rates of substitution and marginal cost the econometric method is a micro based approach to the estimation of the marginal rate of substitution function this method accounts for possible tiebout bias caused by the fact that individuals may choose their school districts in accordance with their tastes for education

residential choice and the supply of local public goods abstract this paper deals with the supply of local public goods in an agglomeration consisting of a central city and a given number of suburban communities the properties of an equilibrium under free mobility are studied in particular a community s population size level of public good and public spending are analyzed as a function of distance to the central city an extension analyzes an equilibrium with two income classes and the corresponding income location pattern

a micro data approach to the identification of credit crunches this article presents a micro data approach to the identification of credit crunches using a survey among german firms which regularly queries the firms assessment of the current willingness of banks to extend credit we estimate the probability of a restrictive loan supply policy by time taking into account the creditworthiness of borrowers creditworthiness is approximated by firm specific factors e g the firms assessment of their current business situation and their business expectations after controlling for the return on the banks risk free investment alternative which is also likely to affect the supply of loans we derive a credit crunch indicator which measures that part of the shift in the loan supply that is neither explained by firm specific factors nor by the opportunity costs of providing risky loans

note comment and letter to the editorsustainable oligopolies in this paper we show that an oligopoly market where both increasing returns to scale and competition are present can nevertheless satisfy stability conditions in a sustainable oligopoly 1 each consumer chooses the firm which proposes the price quality schedule he prefers 2 firms earn non negative profits 3 no new firm could attract consumers and make profits we prove that such a sustainable oligopoly exists under rather weak assumptions the results apply to most models of vertical or horizontal product differentiation or to models of quality differentiation due to congestion effects

is trade good or bad for the environment sorting out the causality we seek to contribute to the debate over globalization and the environment by asking what is the effect of trade on a country s environment for a given level of gdp we take specific account of the endogeneity of trade using exogenous geographic determinants of trade as instrumental variables we find that trade tends to reduce three measures of air pollution statistical significance is high for concentrations of so2 moderate for no2 and lacking for particulate matter although results for other environmental measures are not as encouraging there is little evidence that trade has a detrimental effect on the environment

individual production community characteristics and the provision of local public services abstract socioeconomic variables reflect differences in individual production functions for such commodities as a personal safety or education where both private goods and community characteristics are inputs to this production government activities are demanded because of their direct impact on community characteristics and indirect contribution to production since each activity affects many characteristics efficient provision depends upon the proper consideration of the cross effects of community activities on characteristics because production functions may differ across demographic groups efficient provision depends upon community demographics and heterogeneity in equilibrium may result a method for indexing public services using community characteristics is suggested allowing the isolation of movements in prices and quantities from expenditure data

tiebout with politics capital tax competition and constitutional choices this paper examines how capital tax competition affects jurisdiction formation we describe a non cooperative locational model of public goods provision choices where the levels of taxation and the local public good varieties provided within jurisdictions are selected by majority voting and where equilibrium jurisdictions consist of consumers with similar tastes we show that interjurisdictional tax competition results in an enlargement of jurisdictional boundaries and even in the absence of intrajurisdictional transfers can raise welfare for all members of a jurisdiction

the economic case for limits to government in june of 1978 the voters of california approved proposition 13 restricting the rate of local property taxation to no more than 1 percent of 1975 market values in november 1978 the voters of michigan approved the headlee amendment which limited state revenues from own sources to a fixed share of state personal income in november of 1980 massachusetts voters followed the lead of california and required all cities and towns to limit their taxation to a rate of 22 percent of full and fair cash value numerous hypotheses have been advanced and analyzed to explain the emergence of these new restrictions on fiscal choice the results point to two explanations voters feel governments are too big providing more services than what they prefer or governments spend too much on redistributive activities to help the poor and through higher wages to help public employees themselves the response to this perceived failure of government has been to propose and in california michigan and massachusetts to approve absolute limits to government expenditures the question i wish to address here is whether a compelling economic argument can be advanced for such a policy response politics and personalities aside the answer i think is yes but particular preconditions must apply first and perhaps most importantly is the inability of citizens to directly control the provision of public services responsibility for providing public goods is delegated to agents of the voter and these agents be they bureaucrats or elected representatives have their own objectives and an ability to act upon them to the possible disadvantage of the voters second without direct control over public outputs voters must use indirect controls through the manipulation of their appointed agents these indirect controls take two general forms price incentives or quantity restrictions third the choice of either of these indirect controls must take place before the agent acts to provide public goods further voters must often make their choice of a price or quantity control before the benefits or costs of the public service are known to them with certainty agents however can wait to observe true benefits and coststhat is why we use agents and then provide a level of public services in response to costs benefits and the voters chosen control voter uncertainty over benefits and costs can be interpreted as placing the voter within a constitutional perspective where a voter s precise position in society that is his or her benefits and costs are unknown when choosing a control geoffrey brennan and james buchanan ch 1 were the first to really stress this important point fourth if benefit and cost uncertainty is predominantly over the position rather than slope of the marginal benefit and marginal cost schedules and if the marginal benefit schedule is relatively steep loosely an inelastic demand curve while the marginal cost schedule is relatively flat an elastic supply curve then quantity controls on agents behavior through tax or spending limitations will be the preferred control these four preconditions strike me as quite plausible rather than just an emotional reaction to a peculiar configuration of political and economic circumstances proposition 13 the headlee amendment and proposition 24 may be perfectly reasoned responses to a failure in the politi professor university of pennsylvania and research associate the national bureau of economic research inc an alternative hypothesis which has been tested and generally rejected attributes voter approval to a desire to alter the tax mix away from property taxation and towards other taxes what approving voters really want it seems is increased government efficiency and less redistribution see the recent studies by jack citrin paul courant edward gramlich and daniel rubinfeld and helen ladd and julie wilson

efficient exchange with a variable number of consumers the notion of a club efficient allocation introduced in this paper is shown to allow for a unifying treatment of rather disparate matters the main result deals with the dual characterization of such allocations the fundamental theorems of welfare economics the limit theorem on the core and a general version of a henry george theorem on the relationship between aggregate land rent and local public expenditures all can be recovered as special cases of this paper s main result

second best taxation as a game second best theory usually lies in the realm of normative analysis it focuses attention on the best solutions which still can be obtained in problems where constraints of various natures forbid the attainment of first best pareto optimal situations its central concern is the characterization of such second best solutions and a large part of the literature concentrates on the optimal design of taxes or of policies of public firms taking a second best problem we try in this paper to shift the emphasis from normative to positive considerations the solution we are interested in is not optimal with respect to some a priori given social welfare function embodying justice objectives but it is supposed to reflect the power of the different agents in a negotiation process clearly the conceptual tools required for such an analysis are to be found in game theory and it is actually a game theoretical approach that we follow here the model we are looking at is presented in section ii it formalizes one of the simplest second best problems that can be imagined we have a twogood economy with one private good and one public good agents have different wealth in private good and the public good is financed through a wealth tax this latter fiscal system is clearly not flexible enough to adjust contributions with marginal willingnesses to pay so that we actually face a second best situation there is one decision variable in the society the tax rate which determines the public good production about which the agents have conflicting desires to this problem we associate a game which provides a precise framework for the analysis of the power of the agents the positive outcomes of the negotiation process are supposed to belong to the core of this game sections iii and iv concentrate on the analysis of the core the results strongly contrast with those obtained in the classical studies of the core of 67 0022 053 l 81 040067 25 02 00 o

prudential regulation and the credit crunch evidence from japan the underlying causes of sharp declines in bank lending during recessions in large developed economies as exemplified by the u s in the early 1990s and japan in the late 1990s are still being debated due to the lack of any convincing identification strategy of the supply side capital lending relationship from lending demand using within bank share of real estate lending in the late 1980s as an instrumental variable for bank capital we find that japanese banks cut back on their lending in response to a large loss of bank capital in fiscal year 1997

are rta agreements with environmental provisions reducing emissions article i nfo this paper investigates whether rtas with environmental provisions affect relative and absolute pollution levels in order to do so the determinants of carbon dioxide emissions convergence are estimated for a cross section of 182 countries over the period 1980 to 2008 a propensity score matching approach is com bined with difference in differences techniques to effectively isolate the effect of the regional trade agree ment rta variable the usual controls for scale composition and technique effects are added to the estimated model and the endogeneity of income and trade variables is modeled using instruments the main results indicate that the co2 emissions of the pairs of countries that belong to an rta with environmen tal provisions tend to converge and are lower in absolute terms whereas this is not the case for rtas without environmental provisions as regards specific agreements we find that emissions converge more rapidly for nafta than for eu 27 and euro med countries we find consistent evidence that only rtas with environ mental harmonization policies affect relative and absolute pollution levels

equilibrium in a finite local public goods economy abstract this paper examines the existence of a noncooperative equilibrium in a finite local public goods economy where consumers have quasi linear preferences jurisdictions consist of consumers who chose the same public project and finance the cost of production of public goods through either a proportional income tax or a poll tax we show that under a proportional income tax scheme a nash equilibria may fail to exist under a poll tax scheme an equilibrium always exists but in general nash equilibria violate a very weak efficiency condition we conclude by commenting on the stabilizing effect of zoning policies journal of economic literatureclassification number c71

zombie lending and depressed restructuring in japan this paper explores the role that misdirected bank lending played in prolonging the japanese macroeconomic stagnation that began in the early 1990s the investigation focuses on the wide spread practice of japanese banks of continuing to lend to otherwise insolvent firms we docu ment the prevalence of this forbearance lending and show its distorting effects on healthy firms that were competing with the impaired firms the paper by hoshi 2000 was the first to call attention to this phenomenon and its ramifi

trade and the greenhouse gas emissions from international freight transport we collect extensive data on worldwide trade by transportation mode and use this to provide detailed comparisons of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with output versus international transportation of traded goods international transport is responsible for 33 percent of world wide trade related emissions and over 75 percent of emissions for major manufacturing categories including transport dramatically changes the ranking of countries by emissions per dollar of trade we systematically investigate whether trade inclusive of transport can lower emissions in one quarter of cases the difference in output emissions is more than enough to compensate for the emissions cost of transport finally we examine how likely patterns of global trade growth will affect modal use and emissions full liberalization of tariffs and gdp growth concentrated in china and india lead to transport emissions growing much faster than the value of trade due to trade shifting toward distant trading partners

political institutions and sorting in a tiebout model we construct a computational model of tiebout competition and show that political institutions differ in their ability to sort citizens effectively in particular we find that certain types of institutions those that become more politically unstable as citizen heterogeneity increases perform relatively poorly given a single jurisdiction yet these same institutions perform relatively well when there are multiple jurisdictions we provide an explanation for this phenomenon which draws upon simulated annealing a discrete nonlinear search algorithm jel

quantities qualities and multiple public services in the tiebout model abstract this paper introduces a new more realistic characterization of local public services this characterization fits education parks and streets none of which are a pure samuelsonian good it is shown that tiebout s hypothesis holds for this new type of services provided correct user charges are adopted introducing several local services considerably affects the results the paper emphasizes the difference in tastes with regard to quality as opposed to quantity earlier literature is shown to apply to the role of quality and ignores the role of quantity the effect of the latter makes mixed communities more efficient than segregated ones it is shown that efficient allocation with mixed communities is an equilibrium in a costless mobility tiebout type setting

the international transmission of financial shocks the case of japan one of the more dramatic financial events of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the surge in japanese stock prices that was immediately followed by a very sharp decline of more than 50 percent while the unprecedented fluctuations in japanese stock prices were domestic financial shocks the unique institutional characteristics of the japanese economy produce a framework that is particularly suited to the transmission of such shocks to other countries through the behavior of the japanese banking system the large size of japanese bank lending operations in the united states enables us to use u s banking data to investigate the extent to which this domestic japanese financial shock was transmitted to the united states as well as to identify a supply shock to u s bank lending that is independent of u s loan demand we find that binding risk based capital requirements associated with the decline in the japanese stock market resulted in a decline in commercial lending by japanese banks in the united states that was both economically and statistically significant this finding has added importance given the severe real estate loan problems currently faced by japanese banks how japanese bank regulators decide to resolve these problems will have significant implications for credit availability in the united states as well as in other countries with a significant japanese bank presence

fiscal federalism in europe lessons from the united states experience the existing political and legal institutions of fiscal policy making are under challenge as the united states and the eastern european and soviet states experiment with policy decentralization the states of western europe are looking to a more centralized policy structure via the e e c this paper seeks to raise issues of importance to all such reform efforts notably the need to consider and balance the inefficiencies of fiscal policy decentralization spillovers and wasteful fiscal competition against the inefficiencies of fiscal policy centralization policy cycles and localized pork barrel spending and taxes the need to develop new fiscal policy institutions emphasizing voluntary agreements and responsive agenda setters is stressed robert p inman daniel l rubinfeld department of finance and economics school of law and the wharton school of management department of economics university of pennsylvania university of california philadelphia pa 19104 berkeley ca 94720 and neer fiscal federalism in europe lessons from the united states e perienc by robert p inman and daniel l rubinfeld2 in democratic and totalitarian regimes alike the existing political and legal institutions of economic policy making are under challenge the wisdom of centralized fiscal regimes is now being questioned quietly under the banner of the new federalism in the united states and vocally if not violently through the secessionist movements of eastern europe and the soviet states as these nations experiment with decentralized fiscal institutions the countries of western europe are now looking to the potential of a more centralized economic order within the new european economic community this paper seeks to raise issues of importance to all such reform efforts and within that context to offer some cautionary advise for the design of e e c fiscal institutions based upon the recent american experience with centralized fiscal policy making ii the role for central government fiscal policies in economic unions the european community s progress towards an economic and monetary union the authors wish to thank allesandra casella and barry eichengreen for helpful comments and discussions 2 the authors are professor of finance and economics university of pennsylvania and research associate of the nber and professor of law and economics university of california at berkeley respectively professor rubinfeld gratefully acknowledges the support of the center for real estate and urban economics at the university of california berkeley based upon a common currency will create new demands for the design of fiscal policy 3 perhaps most importantly with a common currency and thus a common monetary policy member states will no longer be able to influence their local economies through exchange rate or monetary policies when state specific economic shocks occur 4 state specific fiscal policies stand as an alternative three questions arise 1 can member state fiscal policies be effective in offsetting local economic shocks in an integrated economic union 2 if effective are such policies likely to be optimally managed at the state level and 3 if ineffective or non optimal what central government policies might be then preferred the recent united states experience is instructive on each point can member state fiscal policies be effective in open integrated economies deficit financed demand creation may be of only limited usefulness to small member states first the demand stimulus of deficit financing is dissipated through import demands from other union states gramlich 1987 has shown that the effectiveness of deficit policies in the smallest u s states is significantly import constrained though larger states may be able to use own deficits to affect state employment prospects second in member states the use of such deficits to combat local shocks may be significantly limited by what the capital markets will allow while deficits may be see eichengreen 1990 there is growing evidence of the economic importance of state specific economic shocks to the short run and long run prospects of states and regions in integrated economic unions see bernard and durlauf 1991 for a study of oecd countries many of which are in the eec and brown coulson and engle 1990 for a study of u s states member states which manage these shocks well are likely to enjoy higher long run growth beneficial to the local economy during downturns and while member states may promise to repay those deficits with surpluses during the upswing such promises are difficult to enforce the u s capital market has appeared reluctant to accept a state s promise of a balanced budget over a business cycle such promises lack credibility when temporary economic downturns are not easily distinguished from long run structural declines when good deficits cannot be distinguished from bad the only credible local government promise may be a balanced budget in each fiscal year the stringent u s state budgets for the recessionary 1992 fiscal year balanced through major tax increases and deep spending cuts offer evidence on the point 5 even if member state deficit policies are economically feasible their management may be non optimal in interdependent economic unions the benefits from local demand creation through deficit financing may spillover to other member states via import expansion while the interest costs of deficits remain with the borrowing state the result will be an under provision of expansionary fiscal policies by member states using the arguments of hart 1982 central government fiscal policies stand as the policy

incentives for separation and incentives for public good provision in this paper i examine how the incentives of regions to unite and to separate are related to the incentives to provide public goods separation allows for greater influence over the nature of political decision making while unification allows regions to exploit economies of scale in the provision of public goods from a social welfare perspective there are excessive incentives for separation and for the provision of public goods when incentives for public good provision are not taken into account however these incentives can be misinterpreted as incentives for separation

fiscal federalism in europe in democratic and totalitarian regimes alike the existing political and legal institutions of economic policy making are under challenge the wisdom of centralized fiscal regimes is now being questioned quietly under the banner of the new federalism in the united states and vocally if not violently through the secessionist movements of eastern europe and the soviet states as these nations experiment with decentralized fiscal institutions western europe is now looking to a more centralized economic order within the new european economic community this paper seeks to raise issues of importance to all such reform efforts and within that context to offer some cautionary advise for the design of e e c fiscal institutions

economic theories of the break up and integration of nations abstract this paper surveys the recent political economy literature on the size distribution of nations the main themes of this literature are 1 a the spread of democracy leads to the creation of too many sovereign states 2 b the extent of factor mobility plays a key role in determining the incentives towards separation or integration 3 c economic integration through the development of international trade may require greater political integration to create and effectively maintain a level playing field in international trade at the same time economic integration by reducing the economic costs of separation increases the incentives towards political separation

voting with ballots and feet existence of equilibrium in a local public good economy abstract this paper proves a general existence theorem for equilibrium in a local public good economy with free mobility by extending greenberg and shitovitz s j econ theory46 1988 223 236 approach each jurisdiction s collective choice rule is the d majority voting rule proposed by greenberg econometrica47 1979 627 636 spillover effects of local public goods externalities due to the population distribution and snob effects are all allowed we need transitivity and completeness of preferences these assumptions are not used by greenberg and shitovitz because they do not permit consumers to move free mobility of consumers causes disconnections in consumption sets a problem addressed here journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c62 d72 h72 r13

the consequences of overlapping tax bases for redistribution and public spending in a federation tax and expenditure policies are studied in a federation with imperfectly mobile households states implement a linear progressive tax and supply a public good a vertical fiscal externality reflecting the effect of state policies on federal revenues provides an incentive for state taxes to be too progressive a horizontal fiscal externality causes nonoptimal state taxes and expenditures because of the migration effect the federal government implements its own linear progressive tax and makes transfers to the states the federal government can nullify both externalities by appropriate fiscal policies and redistributive taxation can be decentralized to the states c 1998 elsevier science s a

the capital crunch neither a borrower nor a lender be the dramatic reduction in the growth rate of bank lending associated with the 1990 91 recession particularly in new england has evoked claims by many observers of a credit crunch however because of the difficulty in determining whether the observed slow credit growth is a demand or supply phenomenon convincing evidence of the practical importance of credit crunches for economic activity remains elusive we overcome this obstacle by examining a cross section of banks in new england that have experienced the same economic downturn effectively controlling for changes in demand we find empirical support for a capital crunch whereby poorly capitalized institutions shrink to satisfy capital requirements this alone is not a sufficient condition for a credit crunch however we find s6me additional evidence that the ca ital crunch may have limited credit availability in new england

property value maximization and public sector efficiency abstract this paper analyses the efficiency implications of property value maximization communities are open so that utilities are parametric to housing producers and the local government each local government chooses its public good output to maximize aggregate property value in the community ignoring feedback effects on the composition of the housing stock it is shown that this type of government behavior generates an equilibrium in which all communities are internally pareto efficient

heterogeneity of preferences for local public goods the case of private expenditure on public education abstract revealed preference techniques are used to investigate the degree of heterogeneity of local public good preferences by testing the hypothesis that demographic characteristics are correlated with preferences for expenditure on public education the test relies on a goodness of fit index which is on an estimation of wasted consumer expenditure we use bootstrap techniques to estimate the distribution of the test statistic preference heterogeneity is found to be common however democrat protestant households are found to have similar tastes and to a lesser extent so are households with school age children where at least one other trait is held in common republicans exhibit the greatest degree of preference heterogeneity

the selection principle and market failure in systems competition abstract if governments stepped in where markets failed reintroducing markets through the backdoor of systems competition will again result in market failure three models are presented which illustrate this wisdom the first is concerned with congestion prone public goods and shows that fiscal competition may be ruinous for the governments the second considers the insurance function of redistributive taxation and shows that systems competition may suffer from adverse selection the third studies the role of quality regulation and shows that systems competition may be a competition of laxity resulting in inefficiently low quality standards

capital requirements monetary policy and aggregate bank lending theory and empirical evidence capital requirements linked solely to credit risk are shown to increase equilibrium credit rationing and lower aggregate lending the model predicts that the bank s decision to lend will cause an abnormal runup in the borrower s stock price and that this reaction will be greater the more capital constrained the bank i provide empirical support for this prediction the model explains the recent inability of the federal reserve to stimulate bank lending by increasing the money supply i show that increasing the money supply can either raise or lower lending when capital requirements are linked only to credit risk the motivation of this article is first to examine the impact of risk based capital requirements namely those that link mandatory capital to asset ratios for banks to their loans on aggregate bank lending these requirements called the basle capital rules or bis guidelines went into effect in march 1989 for banks in the leading industrialized nations these rules initially required banks to maintain capital equal to 7 25 percent of business and most consumer loans with the requirement increasing to 8 percent by the end of 1992 secondly i wish to understand the link between monetary policy and aggregate bank credit in the presence of risk based capital requirements my curiosity is sparked in part by two recent phenomena one is the experience of the u s economy which displayed sluggish growth during 1989 93 despite a monetary policy that attempted to spur bank lending and economic activity and the other is the striking decline in loans relative to security holdings mostly government bonds in the asset portfolios of u s

does trade openness improve environmental quality the literature on trade openness economic development and the environment is largely inconclusive about the environmental consequences of trade this study treats trade and income as endogenous and estimates the overall impact of trade openness on environmental quality using the instrumental variables technique we find that whether or not trade has a beneficial effect on the environment varies depending on the pollutant and the country trade is found to benefit the environment in oecd countries it has detrimental effects however on sulfur dioxide so2 and carbon dioxide co2 emissions in non oecd countries although it does lower biochemical oxygen demand bod emissions in these countries we also find the impact is large in the long term after the dynamic adjustment process although it is small in the short term

in search of capital crunch supply factors behind the credit slowdown in japan the seeming failure of loose monetary policy to reactivate japan s economy has led some observers to suggest that the usual credit channels through which monetary policy affects the real economy are blocked and this is because of a pervasive shortage of bank capital that has induced a leftward shift in the supply of bank credit this is the so called capital crunch hypothesis this paper finds support for the hypothesis in the bank data for 1997 a year during which the landscape of the japanese financial system underwent some fundamental changes

local public goods with mobility existence and optimality of a general equilibrium abstract the existence and optimality of a general equilibrium in a model with a finite number of locations among which the continuum of individuals each individual belonging to one of a finite number of types have to choose is investigated each community finances its own production of public goods by taxes the way in which the tax burden in shared among the different types in the different regions is left arbitrary the model allows for restrictions on the mobility of either residents and or workers congestion and externalities in both production and consumption commuting costs preferences of an individual may also depend on his location as well as on the distribution of all individuals across locations

the persistence and inefficiency of property tax finance of local public expenditures abstract i both characterize and evaluate equilibrium outcomes in multiple jurisdiction economies with property and land taxation but where direct taxation of residents is not possible the model contains perfectly mobile capital and population and competitive entrepreneurial governments that choose local taxes and expenditures to maximize after tax land rent when the cost of public goods is proportional to population the property tax emerges as the sole source of local finance even though the land tax has no deadweight loss it is shown that equilibria are not constrained efficient in general hence decentralized decision making is not consistent with the best use of the available tax instruments

do local governments use their tax bases efficiently abstract this paper analyzes an economy with multiple governments and with mobility of individuals across jurisdictions where each government is constrained to raise revenue for public expenditures using distortionary taxes a government is said to be competitive if the total benefits and costs of its decisions including the excess burden are perceived to be internalized the competitive equilibrium allocations are not constrained efficient in general there exists another set of distortionary taxes and public expenditures such that when private sector behavior adjusts to maintain equilibrium all individuals in the economy are better off thus competitive decentralized decision making does not lead to an efficient use of the available tax instruments it is also shown that the source of the failure can be interpreted as a missing market and the form of the best decentralized remedy which involves pricing the tax base is derived

a classroom exercise voting by ballots and feet this classroom experiment illustrates the efficiency enhancing property of a tiebout system in which local public goods decisions are determined by a political process students are given playing cards that induce diverse preferences for expenditures on alternative public goods and are initially assigned to specific communities then those in each community vote on the type and level of public goods provision which determine the tax cost after the provision and tax results are announced students are free to move to a location where the prior results are more consistent with their preferences this process continues for several rounds with a new vote taken at each location after moves have been made the exercise demonstrates that the combination of voting with feet and ballots tends to increase the total net benefit for all communities the voting on provision levels is structured to facilitate a discussion of the median voter theorem

property taxes and property values evidence from proposition 212 abstract we examine the effect of proposition 2 1 2 on revenues and housing prices in massachusetts communities that were initially constrained by the law saw large increases in state aid and the use of fees we use these initial constraints as instruments for changes in other components of revenue while treating the change in the property tax as exogenously determined by proposition 2 1 2 our results strongly suggest that communities that were able to increase their property taxes more rapidly saw greater increases in their housing values in the period following passage of the law

entrepreneurial land developers joint production local externalities and mixed housing developments abstract housing developments condos and suburban developments are not necessarily homogeneous developers provide different types of units of various sizes and other characteristics catering to different types of customers in this paper we allow joint production and local consumption externalities within each development and show that land developers who seek a profit maximizing set of units in developments may provide mixed developments we show that there exists an equilibrium and that every equilibrium is pareto efficient we provide examples in which mixed developments arise in a long run equilibrium we relate this work to a widely used hedonic pricing model by rosen 1974 and to an equilibrium concept under asymmetric information by rothschild and stiglitz 1976

robotization and labour dislocation in the manufacturing sectors of oecd countries a panel var approach robots are the most important innovation which has affected the production process in the last three decades thanks to the latest advances in technology they have been able to perform an ever inc

a mechanism design approach to the tiebout hypothesis we revisit the tiebout hypothesis in a world in which agents may learn extra information as to how they value the various local public goods once located and jurisdictions are free to commit to whatever mechanism to attract citizens it is shown in quasi linear environments that efficiency can be achieved as a competitive equilibrium when jurisdictions seek to maximize local revenues but not necessarily when they seek to maximize local welfare interpretations and limitations of the result are discussed

political centralization and government accountability boffa acknowledges financial support from the free university of bolzano ww82 piolatto from the spanish ministry of science and innovation eco 2012 37131 and the government of catalonia 2014 sgr 420 ponzetto from the spanish ministry of science and innovation jci 2010 08414 and eco 2011 25624 the spanish ministry of economy and competitiveness ryc 2013 13838 the government of catalonia 2009 sgr 1157 and 2014 sgr 830 the barcelona gse and the bbva foundation through its first grant for researchers innovators and cultural creators

local authority fiscal stance and the pattern of residential migration in the north west of england the degree of fiscal mobility present in household migration flows between local authority areas in northwestern england is assessed following an introduction the paper is divided into three sections the first reviews the methodologies of previous attempts to assess the extent of fiscally induced migration noting the dominance of american studies and outlines a choice theoretic structure within which it is possible to model human migration patterns section iii considers the problems inherent in modelling migration flows and section iv presents results for a compound poisson analysis of migration between local authority areas within the four counties of the north west region of england as well as an assessment of the prevalence of fiscal mobility excerpt

sorting by foot travel for local public goods and equilibrium stratification we re examine tiebout s hypothesis of endogenous sorting in a competitive spatial equilibrium framework by considering both income and preference heterogeneity and by allowing agents to decide endogenously the number of visits to a travel for local public good the equilibrium configuration may be completely segregated incompletely segregated or completely integrated depending on relative market rents and income preference local tax parameters a segregated equilibrium may feature endogenous sorting purely by income or by both income and preferences while the rich need not be closer to the local public facility site multiple equilibria may arise when the equilibrium configuration is incompletely segregated jel classification d50 h41 classification par deplacement biens publics locaux accessibles par deplacement et stratification d equilibre les auteurs reexaminent l hypothese de tiebout de classification endogene dans un cadre d equilibre spatial concurrentiel en tenant compte a la fois de l heterogeneite des revenus et des preferences ainsi qu en permettant aux agents de decider de maniere endogene du nombre de visites pour se procurer un bien public local par deplacement il peut s ensuivre des equilibres de segregation complete de segregation incomplete ou d integration complete selon les rentes relatives et les parametres de revenus de preferences ou de fiscalite locale un equilibre de segregation peut entrainer une classification endogene sur la base seulement des revenus ou sur la base des revenus et des preferences alors que les riches n ont pas besoin d etre plus proches du site du bien public local des equilibres multiples peuvent surgir quand la configuration d equilibre en est une de segregation incomplete

supply and equilibrium in an economy with land and production a model with a finite number of consumers trading in land that can be changed through production is examined unlike most other models in urban economics land is modeled as measurable subsets of a compact set formally there are three major results conditions are found under which a solution to the producer s profit maximization problem exists secondly conditions are found under which a solution to the consumer s problem exists the assumptions used to prove these two results are standard finally the existence of an equilibrium is demonstrated copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the political economy of regionalism we examine the incentives of regions to unite and separate separation allows for greater influence over the nature of political decision making while unification allows regions to exploit economies of scale in the provision of government our paper explores the influence of size location and the diversity within regions in shaping this trade off we then examine the way in which alternative political institutions aggregate regional preferences and thereby define the number of countries

strong tiebout equilibrium under restricted preferences domain abstract we investigate the existence and give a partial characterization of a strong tiebout equilibrium which consists of an endogenously formed partition of the individuals into disjoint jurisdictions with each jurisdiction producing and financing its own public goods and moreover there exists no group of individuals who can all benefit by establishing their own community in particular no single individual finds it desirable to migrate from his equilibrium jurisdiction the existence proof makes use of the notion of consecutive games which we introduce and show that for such games there always exists a partition with a nonempty core

disentangling the demand function from the production function for local public services the case of public safety abstract in this paper we develop a theoretical framework and an econometric model which allow us to separate the effect of income and other socioeconomic variables on the demand for publicly provided goods from their effect on the price of those goods we apply our approach in a study of expenditures for police protection in a cross section of 73 u s cities and counties our results suggest that studies of public expenditures which fail to incorporate community characteristics in production and cost functions can yield very misleading results

distributive implications of european integration one of the main pitfalls of european construction is undoubtedly the alleged charge that it impedes redistributive policy at the national level this charge is indeed widespread in political circles and in the medias yet it had received little attention among economists up to recently over the last few years an increasing amount of research has been devoted to that accusation or to be more neutral to that conjecture the purpose of our paper is to survey this literature we first present the conventional wisdom according to which mobility makes redistribution difficult if not impossible we also discuss the most important qualifications to this result and the solutions that are generally advocated and that imply some sort of cooperation in a second part we consider a different issue that of redistribution across countries it assumes the existence of some supranational government which is not trivial in addition informational differences between the national and the supranational governments are shown to play a crucial role

equilibrium and inefficiency in a community model with peer group effects public service output depends on input expenditures on own personal characteristics and on the characteristics of the other residents in the community the peer group effect in a community model with public expenditures set by voting with migration between communities and with land price differentials capitalization it is shown that communities may become heterogeneous in composition and second best inefficient this equilibrium occurs when the peer group effect is neither too strong nor too weak the inefficiency arises because an externality is created by migration the land price differential does not play the part of the price of the better peer group but of a transfer payment

pigou tiebout property taxation and the underprovision of local public goods abstract pigou s proposition that the use of distorting taxes rather than neutral head taxes reduces public service levels is examined in this paper a simple model with a national system of competing local governments is utilized to demonstrate that the use of a distorting property tax on mobile capital decreases the level of residential public services the case where public services are an intermediate producer good is also considered

bank capital shocks dynamic effects on securities loans and capital abstract we used quarterly data for individual banks to estimate recent dynamic responses to bank capital shocks while it took bank capital and securities only one year to adjust to capital shocks liabilities and most loan categories took two to three years to complete their adjustments compared with those in the late 1980s capital shocks were twice as large and portfolio responses to capital shocks tended to be more rapid in the early 1990s larger banks adjusted each component of their portfolios faster than smaller banks capital shocks caused banks with capital shortfalls to contract more and more quickly in the 1990s than they had in the 1980s

does endogenous formation of jurisdictions lead to wealth stratification conditions under which endogenous processes of jurisdiction formation entail wealth stratification are examined in a model where unequally wealthy households with identical preferences form jurisdictions in order to produce a public good financed by proportional taxation we define a stable jurisdiction structure to be a partition of the households into jurisdictions that is immune to individual deviations we define a jurisdiction structure to be wealth stratified when each jurisdiction is composed of households who form an interval with respect to the ordering of their wealth we show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the stratification of any stable jurisdiction structure is for the individual preferences for the public and the private good to exhibit a relation of gross substitutability complementarity between the public good and the private good that is independent from prices and wealth

assessing the importance of tiebout sorting local heterogeneity from 1850 to 1990 this paper argues that long run trends in geographic segregation are inconsistent with models where residential choice depends solely on local public goods the tiebout hypothesis we develop an extension of the tiebout model that predicts as mobility costs fall the heterogeneity across communities of individual public good preferences and of public good provision must weakly increase given the secular decline in mobility costs these predictions can be evaluated using historical data we find decreasing heterogeneity in policies and proxies for preferences across i a sample of u s municipalities 1870 1990 ii all boston area municipalities 1870 1990 and iii all u s counties 1850 1990

a critique of tiebout s theory of local public expenditures the last section of this paper presents a rigorous version of tiebout s theory of local public goods it is shown that equilibria exist and are pareto optimal this rigorous theory follows closely the more rigorous part of tiebout s work this rigorous theory makes a number of very special assumptions which make local public goods essentially private the body of this paper presents a series of examples which show that if one tries to generalize the rigorous version of tiebout s theory in a number of interesting directions then equilibria may no longer exist or may not be pareto optimal the conclusion is that tiebout s idea does not lead to a satisfactory general theory of local public goods the goal of this paper is to point out that tiebout s notion of equilibrium with local governments does not have the nice properties of general competitive equilibrium except under very restrictive assumptions tiebout 39 suggested that there are competitive forces which tend to make local governments allocate resources in a pareto optimal fashion consumers choose to live in those towns with the mix of taxes and public goods they prefer local governments choose this mix so as to attract inhabitants this idea may seem intriguing for it suggests that the invisible hand solves an important part of samuelson s perplexing public goods problem 32 tiebout in fact makes an argument which is nearly rigorous i give a rigorous version of his argument at the end of the paper however in this rigorous version so many restrictive assumptions are made that public goods become essentially private in the body of the paper i give a series of examples with which i try to convince the reader that one is forced to adopt tiebout s restrictive assumptions the idea is that if one changes any of his assumptions then either equilibria may not exist or may not be pareto optimal my examples are presented in the context of a general class of tiebout models i consider several subclasses one of which is the special case considered by tiebout in each of the subclasses except that considered by tiebout i give a counterexample either to the existence of equilibrium or to its pareto optimality the subclasses are so chosen that the difficulties they reveal would be shared by any reasonable tiebout model which differed from his special case i believe that my examples controvert tiebout s suggestion 39 last paragraph that his theory compares favorably with competitive equilibrium theory most of the examples in this paper have already appeared in the literature i cite related work as i go along what is new here is that i assemble the examples in a unified argument

accountability and decentralisation in government an incomplete contracts model this paper approaches the question of the appropriate level of decentralisation of power in government as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts the model of the paper compares allocations of power to local central and regional government as alternative means of motivating governments to act in the interests of citizens centralisation allows benefits from policy coordination but has costs in terms of diminished accountability which can be precisely defined as the reduced probability that the welfare of a given region can determine the re election of the government the model is extended to allow for conflicts of interest within regions and externalities between central and local governments in a federation it is also applied to determining levels of fiscal transfer between localities and to circumstances where governments may act as leviathans appropriating resources for their own use

local government structure and urban residential location the large research literature on the tiebout model has developed with little attention paid to the urban economic structure in which local government functions this paper attempts to examine the theoretical consequences of local jurisdictions functioning within a conventional monocentric urban model it also discusses a mathematical formulation of a two jurisdiction linear city in which the local service level and local property tax rate might be used as strategic variables in a game theory sense it is concluded that for this to happen the local service level has to have more than one element which is intuitively appealing some references are developed to current british local government and possible changes

clubs and the market large finite economies abstract this paper builds a general equilibrium model of finite economies with exchange and club formation agents trade multiple private goods widely in the market can belong to several clubs and care about the characteristics of other club members because club memberships are indivisible and choices of club memberships must be coordinated across the population the core of such an economy may be empty and equilibrium may not exist however for large finite club economies an approximate core is not empty and states in this approximate core can be approximately decentralized by prices for private goods and for club memberships the arguments use convexification tools familiar from the literature on private goods economies and a new tool of some independent interest that addresses the special problems created by the nature of club memberships journal of economic literature classification numbers d2 d5 h4

public economics and the theory of public policy when james mirrlees and william vickrey were awarded the nobel prize in economics last year it marked only the third time that the award had gone to scholars of public sector economics in contrast to the reception given to the previous two winners ronald coase and james buchanan the news was greeted with some bewilderment by policy specialists once removed from the academic literature who are mirrlees and vickrey and what have they done that has been of lasting benefit to the study of public economics let alone of practical benefit to policy makers this seems to me to be a fair question coase after all had set out a conceptual approach to the study of externalities and transaction costs that has become an implicit part of the methodological baggage carried around by policy economists and policy makers alike buchanan was in part responsible for the welcome emphasis on institutions in public sector decision making and for insisting that politicians bureaucrats and voters are human beings with human motives the legacy of mirrlees and vickrey is less well known but i would argue it is every bit as profound their approach to the theory of economic policy which is grounded on the importance of imperfect information as a constraint on public policy has changed the very nature of public economics research and of its implications for economic

household location and tiebout do families sort according to preferences for locational amenities abstract if households sort efficiently across locations then at a given location families receive the same marginal benefit from the locational amenities we test for such sorting by imposing cross equation restrictions on hedonic regressions that difference away location versus house specific effects estimates are obtained using a unique subset of the american housing survey in which adjacent housing units are grouped together and observed in both 1985 and 1989 rejection of the cross equation restrictions unambiguously implies an inefficient sorting of households in contrast the data support the cross equation restrictions which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for efficient sorting

tiebout sorting and neighborhood stratification tiebout s classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions predicting in the simplest instance a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities ordered by income typically urban areas are less than fully stratified and the question arises how much do departures from standard tiebout assumptions contribute to observed within neighborhood mixing this paper quantifies the separate effects of employment geography via costly commuting and preferences for housing attributes on neighborhood stratification it does so using an equilibrium sorting model estimated with rich census micro data simulations based on the model and credible preference estimates show that counterfactual reductions in commuting costs lead to marked increases in racial and education segregation and to a lesser degree increases in income segregation given that households now find it easier to locate in neighborhoods with like households while turning off preferences for housing characteristics increases racial segregation especially for blacks doing so reduces income segregation indicating that heterogeneity in the housing stock serves to stratify households based on ability to pay further we show that differences in housing help to accentuate differences in the consumption of local amenities

the role of ttip on the environment the current study empirically investigates and shows that on average the possible implementation of the transatlantic trade and investment partnership ttip would generally help in the fight against global warming in particular the study finds that a one percent increase in the bilateral trade between the u s and the typical eu member would reduce annual per capita emissions of co2 and ghgs in the typical ttip member by about 2 7 and 2 4 percent respectively however results also show that ttip may increase annual per capita emissions of ghgs in the u s by about 2 5 percent per year these results stand because the factor endowment hypothesis feh and the pollution haven hypothesis based on population density variations phh2 appear to dominate the pollution haven hypothesis based on national income differences phh1

clubs in an urban setting abstract in this paper the properties of a congestable concentrated local public good ccolpg are described taking into account both locational aspects and congestion this discussion therefore completes the analysis of congestable local public goods lpg which was started in our earlier paper congestable local public goods in an urban setting j urban econ 290 310 1982 it is here shown that the optimal provision of ccolpg leads to the creation of clubs where the government has to determine the location and provide the optimal quantity of lpg in each club and also levy congestion tolls on users according to their level of utilization of the club congestion tolls cover the est part of the costs where is the level of congestability of the ccolpg the rest of the costs are covered by taxing land rents clubs will form possibly more than one per city even if the lpg is pure i e 0 and they will contain a single household if the lpg is private i e 1 the difference between these results and those of classical club theorists stem from the fact that here we also take into account the limited supply of land of given accessibility i e locational aspects which like congestion lead to the creation of clubs when these two factors are considered together it explains why congestion tolls alone are not sufficient to finance clubs operations or why pure lpgs also have to be provided locally etc

tiebout economies with differential genetic types and endogenously chosen crowding characteristics abstract we consider a tiebout economy with differential crowding and public projects in which agents are distinguished by their tastes and genetic endowments agents choose which crowding characteristic for example a skill they wish to express and this affects their value to other members of their jurisdiction club firm etc an agent s choice is influenced both by his genetic endowment which affects his cost of acquiring crowding characteristics and by his preferences over which crowding characteristic he expresses we show that if small groups are strictly effective the core is equivalent to the set of anonymous competitive equilibrium outcomes but that the core generally contains taste homogeneous jurisdictions journal of economic literature classification numbers h41 h72

shocks to bank capital evidence from uk banks at home and away this article assesses how shocks to bank capital may influence a bank s portfolio behaviour using novel evidence from a uk bank panel data set from a period that predates the recent financial crisis focusing on the behaviour of bank loans we extract the dynamic response of a bank to innovations in its capital and in its regulatory capital buffer we find that innovations in a bank s capital in this precrisis sample period were coupled with a loan response that lasted up to 3 years the international presence of uk banks allows us to identify a specific driver of capital shocks in our data independent of bank lending to uk residents specifically we use write offs on loans to nonresidents to instrument bank capital s impact on uk resident lending a fall in capital brought about a significant drop in lending in particular to private nonfinancial corporations pnfc in contrast household lending increased when capital fell which may indicate that in this precrisis period banks substituted into l

towards european monetary union without the ems towards emu without the ems paul de grauwe this paper examines the causes of the breakdown of the ems arguing that ems credibility has always been impaired by recessions this has relevance both for the future of monetary union in europe and for the path by which it might be attained i argue that in comparison with the erm the present more flexible exchange rate arrangements will ease not exacerbate some of the technical problems in making the transition to emu i then analyse the political economy of monetary union and identify the main stumbling blocks that remain finally i set out a specific proposal that takes advantage of the new opportunities to move forward towards emu

equivalence of the core and competitive equilibrium in a tiebout economy with crowding types abstract we propose a new model of a local public goods economy with differentiated crowding the new feature is that taste and crowding characteristics of agents are distinguished from one another we prove that if the economy satisfies strict small group effectiveness then the core is equivalent to the set of tiebout equilibrium outcomes equilibrium prices are defined to depend solely on crowding characteristics this implies that only publicly observable information and not private information such as preferences is needed to induce agents to sort themselves into efficient jurisdictions thus our model allows us to satisfy bewley s 6 anonymity requirement on taxes in his well known criticism of the tiebout hypothesis

credible redistribution policy and skilled migration abstract we analyze the joint determination of income redistribution and migration flows across fiscally independent regions in our model regional governments lack commitment so their policy announcements must be credible and redistribution between skilled and unskilled workers is bounded by informational constraints in any given region the welfare of all workers is increasing in the share of skilled workers as after tax incomes increase for both skilled and unskilled workers when skilled workers are more geographically mobile than unskilled ones the endogenous response of redistribution policy can induce regional agglomeration of skilled workers we also find that the equilibrium features symmetry breaking if migration costs are relatively low and that worker mobility tends to amplify pre existing welfare differences in income and welfare across regions