a dynamic tiebout theory of voluntary vs involuntary provision of public goods this paper considers a dynamic model of tiebout like migration between communities that utilize distinct allocation procedures for public goods at issue is whether voluntary or compulsory procedures are more likely to prevail over time we model infinitely lived individuals who make repeated sequential location decisions over one of two communities each community uses a distinct mechanism for allocating public goods the first is one in which contributions are given voluntarily by the citizenry of the community the second is a compulsory scheme by which individuals are taxed proportionately to wealth with the tax determined by a majority vote opportunities to accumulate wealth exist via accumulation of public capital the markov perfect equilibria of the dynamic game are studied our main result shows that when accumulated wealth converges to a steady state individuals locational choices eventually select the involuntary provision mechanism this holds despite the fact that unanimous location in the voluntary provision community may in many cases remain as a nash equilibrium of the static game each period we also describe conditions under which voluntary provision survives these conditions require that accumulation of capital fails to decrease wealth dispersion over time the results are shown to be consistent with findings relating inequality to school choice

dynamic banking a reconsideration financially intermediated and stock market consumption investment allocations with and without governmental interventions are compared in a welfare sense in overlapping generation economies with and without shocks to agents intertemporal preferences we first show that in economies with preference shocks governmental interventions subject to the same information requirements as those imposed on financial intermediaries lead to stock market allocations that are not inferior to those attained under financial intermediation second we argue that the necessary interventions are qualitatively no different from those required to implement stationary optimal allocations in olg models without shocks to agents intertemporal consumption preferences

the median voter according to garp this paper adapts the generalized axiom of revealed preference garp empirical method to the public goods problem to test whether observed municipal public spending can be explained as if the city governments maximize the utility of the median income voter it applies the test procedure for medium size municipal governments in five midwest states the data are consistent with garp and reveal that the local governments in the sample behave as if they maximize median voter utility once we control for the state specific effects government management structure and population density the median voter hypothesis is the proposition that local governments behave as if they maximize the utility of the median income voter in the jurisdiction although an important tool in public economic analysis there has been no conclusive direct test of the maximization hypothesis to date revealed preference theory shows that any finite set of price and quantity observations satisfying the generalized axiom of revealed preference garp can be rationalized by the constrained maximization of an increasing continuous concave utility function afriat 1967 1973 varian 1982 this paper adapts the revealed preference method to the public goods problem in order to test municipal spending data for consistency under garp thereby providing the first direct test of whether or not the local governments behave as if they maximize median voter utility the median voter hypothesis represents a simple tool that is the most widely used characterization of local government behavior given its prominence in the literature it is not surprising that the hypothesis itself has become the subject of scrutiny the framework assumes direct or representative democracy without strategic behavior in which competition among politicians ensures that the public sector bureaucracy responds efficiently to voters desires public sector decision making reduces to an as if constrained maximization problem a simplified picture of the outcome of collective action still much of the empirical testing literature is motivated by concerns over whether the model is too simplistic nonetheless it can be argued that given its depiction as an as if outcome the median voter hypothesis should be judged not by its descriptive accuracy of the public sector decision process but instead by how well it explains observed local fiscal choices on this basis the existing empirical evidence although mixed reveals a surprising amount of indirect support for the framework one approach taken in the literature is to evaluate the median voter hypothesis by testing the predictive power of regression equations with median income and tax price terms for explaining state or local fiscal behavior in this line of the

repudiation and renegotiation the case of sovereign debt a model of sovereign debt is analyzed in this model renegotiation arises in a natural way because information is incomplete the renegotiation game has many equilibria the standard contract theory approach suggests that the parties should agree to choose the efficient equilibrium strategies when the contract is written refinements of the equilibrium notion such as strategic stability suggest that a very inefficient equilibrium may be chosen the tension between these two approaches raises deep questions about the correct way to analyze a large class of contracting problems copyright 1989 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

micro estimates of public spending demand functions and tests of the tiebout and median voter hypotheses responses to questions given to a random sample of michigan households are used to estimate public spending demand functions while income and price elasticities are similar to those obtained from aggregate data positive income elasticities appear to arise because public services are distributed in a prorich manner a relatively small variance in spending demands among urban and suburban communities in metropolitan areas with substantial public service variety suggests that the tiebout mechanism works this interpretation is supported by the fact that actual spending conforms substantially to desired levels in urban areas but less so in rural areas with little public sector choice

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

an alternate test of the tiebout hypothesis this paper has presented an indirect test of the tiebout hypothesis that does not require explicit consideration of the interaction between the markets for housing and local public services the results suggest that at least in the case of elementary and secondary education when allowed to choose from a selection of jurisdictions individuals locate so as to minimize the allocative inefficiency that results from collective provision of local services

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

optimal financial crises empirical evidence suggests that banking panics are related to the business cycle and are not simply the result of sunspots panics occur when depositors perceive that the returns on bank assets are going to be unusually low we develop a simple model of this in this setting bank runs can be first best efficient they allow efficient risk sharing between early and late withdrawing depositors and they allow banks to hold efficient portfolios however if costly runs or markets for risky assets are introduced central bank intervention of the right kind can lead to a pareto improvement in welfare from the earliest times banks have been plagued by the problem of bank runs in which many or all of the bank s depositors attempt to withdraw their funds simultaneously because banks issue liquid liabilities in the form of deposit contracts but invest in illiquid assets in the form of loans they are vulnerable to runs that can lead to closure and liquidation a financial crisis or banking panic occurs when depositors at many or all of the banks in a region or a country attempt to withdraw their funds simultaneously prior to the twentieth century banking panics occurred frequently in europe and the united states panics were generally regarded as a bad thing and the development of central banks to eliminate panics and ensure financial stability has been an important feature of the history of financial systems it has been a long and involved process the first cerntral bank the bank of sweden was established more than 300 years ago the bank of england played an especially important role in the development of effective stabilization policies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the end of the nineteenth century banking panics had been eliminated in europe the last true panic in england was the overend gurney company crisis of 1866

the federal funds market excess reserves and unconventional monetary policy abstract following the bankruptcy of lehman brothers interbank borrowing and lending dropped whereas reserve holdings of depository institutions skyrocketed as the fed injected liquidity into the u s banking sector this paper introduces bank liquidity risk and limited market participation into a real business cycle model with ex ante identical financial intermediaries and shows in an analytically tractable way how interbank trade and excess reserves emerge in general equilibrium investigating the role of the federal funds market and unconventional monetary policy for the propagation of aggregate real and financial shocks i find that federal funds market participation is irrelevant in response to standard supply and demand shocks whereas it matters for uncertainty shocks i e mean preserving spreads in the cross section of liquidity risk liquidity injections by the central bank can absorb the effects of financial shocks on the real economy although excess reserves might increase and federal funds might be crowded out as a side effect

economic influences on the structure of local government in u s metropolitan areas abstract there is a large degree of variation in the number of general purpose local governments and school districts per square mile and per person among united states metropolitan areas using data from 1982 this paper provides an empirical test of whether economic factors especially variation in demand for local government services partly account for these differences the empirical findings show that after controlling for political historic and institutional factors variations in the characteristics that affect demand for local government services do influence the number of local governments this result is consistent with the hypothesis first put forth by tiebout

the strategic analysis of intermediation the importance and the special character of intermediation were recognized as early as in the eighteenth century and have been stressed by many authors afterwards in spite of this long tradition comparatively little work has been done on the details of the economic theory of intermediation instead it was assumed that intermediation can simply be treated like any other economic activity in contrast i will argue that the theory of intermediation requires a specific game theoretic analysis and moreover that many preconceptions that one might have on the basis of standard microeconomic theory are wrong

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

liquidity provision banking and the allocation of interest rate risk abstract the paper studies the efficient allocation of technology induced interest rate risk and the implications of such risk for efficient liquidity provision complete immunization against interest rate risk is shown to be undesirable as it precludes the exploitation of favourable reinvestment opportunities under the assumptions of diamond dybvig 1983 interest induced valuation risks of long term assets should be born by early withdrawers reinvestment opportunity risks of short term assets by late withdrawers efficient liquidity provision thus entails no shifting of interest rate risk in the absence of additional moral hazard second best allocations can be implemented through unregulated competition among banks

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

deterrence with multiple defendants an explanation for unfair plea bargains this article examines plea bargaining where there are multiple defendants facing a prosecutor the prosecutor s optimal offer to each defendant is shown to depend upon the following two factors i the defendant s ex ante probability of conviction and ii the defendant s ability to increase his co conspirator s probability of conviction furthermore if the ex ante probability of conviction is positively correlated with a defendant s ability to raise his co conspirator s probability of conviction a plea bargain that gives the most culpable defendant the lowest penalty can maximize deterrence

interest margins and bank regulation in central america and the caribbean abstract this paper examines empirically the determinants of bank interest margins in central america and the caribbean over the period 1998 2014 a particular focus is set on the impact of differences in the regulatory environment and market structure across countries in explaining the interest margins of individual banks our results suggest that bank market power operating costs credit risk and liquid asset holdings increase the margin between loan and deposit rates while increased income diversification and gdp growth are associated with lower loan deposit spreads when considering information on banking regulation we find strong evidence to support our main hypothesis that improvements in market quality and liberalization have a significant effect on interest margins more specifically reductions in entry requirements to banking higher involvement of foreign banks and increased financial statement transparency are associated with significant reductions in interest margins

capital requirements and the behaviour of commercial banks abstract i study the consequences of capital regulations on the portfolio choices of commercial banks elaborating on previous work by kareken and wallace 1978 koehn and santomero 1980 and kim and santomero 1988 i obtain the following results if the objective of commercial banks is maximization of the market value of their future profits value maximizing banks capital regulations cannot prevent banks from choosing very specialized and very risky portfolios risk based insurance premia are in fact the relevant instrument for that purpose on the other hand if banks behave as portfolio managers utility maximizing banks capital regulations can be effective but only if the weights used in the computation of the ratio are proportional to the systematic risks of the assets their betas because of limited liability of commercial banks a minimum capital regulation or a closing rule may become necessary as well to prevent failing banks from betting for resurrection

on the welfare equivalence of asset markets and banking in diamond dybvig economies why do people choose bank deposit contracts over a direct participation in asset markets in their seminal paper diamond and dybvig s 1983 answer this question by claiming that bank deposit contracts can implement allocations that are welfare superior to asset markets equilibria the present paper demonstrates that this claim is false whenever the asset market participants are highly rational

financial system design and liquidity provision by banks and markets in a dynamic economy this paper contributes to the literature on financial system design by comparing markets and banks in a dynamic economy investors trade off their liquidity needs against the high returns on illiquid investments both the banking system and the market can provide partial liquidity insurance to investors we consider full market participation as well as limited market participation we demonstrate that the full participation market with intergenerational trading can provide more liquidity than one without insurance is provided through wealth transfer across generations instead of cross subsidization across contemporaneous types as is the case in the finite economy given a full participation market that allows trading across generations only banks with initial capital can provide additional liquidity in a limited participation market with uncertainty about trading types an intergenerational bank with or without initial capital provides additional insurance to investors the need for trade is eliminated finally if there is no uncertainty about trading types then an intergenerational bank with initial capital eliminates the need for trading and improves welfare for all an intergenerational bank without initial capital improves welfare for people who do not trade

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

tiebout bias and the demand for local public schooling institute of university of ii business and california economic research berkeley center for real estate and urban economics working paper series working paper 86 109 tiebout bias and the demand for local public schooling by daniel l rubinfeld perry shipiro judith roberts these papers are preliminary in nature th urpose 39 to stimulate 39 ussion comment therefore they are not t cited or quoted 39 ny p ation wit express permissio the author graduate school of business administration

who bears interest rate risk we study the allocation of interest rate risk within the european banking sector using novel data banks exposure to interest rate risk is small on aggregate but heterogeneous in the cross section contrary to conventional wisdom net worth is increasing in interest rates for approximately half of the institutions in our sample cross sectional variation in banks exposures is driven by cross country differences in loan rate fixation conventions for mortgages banks use derivatives to partially hedge on balance sheet exposures residual exposures imply that changes in interest rates have redistributive effects within the banking sector received october 31 2017 editorial decision august 30 2018 by editor philip strahan authors have furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

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 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

liquidity creation through banks and markets multiple insurance and limited market access abstract the paper studies the intertemporal allocation of funds through demand deposits and anonymous markets first separately and then in an integrated model it reviews some work on the role of market frictions and asset characteristics and suggests that the interplay between these two is crucial in explaining the observed coexistence of demand deposits and anonymous markets

run proof banking without suspension or deposit insurance abstract in a model of banking with asymmetric information among depositors and multiple sources of aggregate risk i show that a demand deposit arrangement with state contingent deposit payments and a priority of claims provision on final date resources is almost best under this arrangement intermediaries infer the realization of aggregate risk and of a privately observed signal on the outcome of the risky technology from depositors withdrawal choices and panics as well as information based runs are averted neither suspension provisions nor deposit insurance are necessary for an efficient run proof banking system furthermore intermediation provides information production services that a credit market does not necessarily provide

banking deregulation in europe banking deregulation ernst baltensperger and jean dermine deregulation of financial services is well under way in many european countries this has led to fears that economies are now more vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks the authors focus on one aspect of financial deregulation namely liberalization of the banking system they show that measures such as the abolition of reserve requirements increase macroeconomic variability under some circumstances but reduce it under others no general macroeconomic case can be made for banking regulation or for its liberalization analysis of microeconomic issues is more fruitful asymmetric information and the risks of contagion in a panic can lead to runs against the banking system to the extent that these are socially inefficient public intervention may be justified this presumption is stronger since the risks of bank runs have grown recently with the increased maturity mismatch the finance of illiquid loans by liquid short term deposits to meet this danger the authors recommend regulation of deposit contracts whilst preserving incentives for bank monitoring by private parties specifically they propose an ex post liability of current and former depositors when banks default thereby offsetting the incentive to withdraw funds at the onset of a crisis being quick off the mark would no longer be sufficient and sophisticated depositors would press for greater disclosure and fuller monitoring of bank activities the authors also recommend that remaining controls on deposit interest rates should be scrapped and that supervision of international banking should be cooperatively conducted by host and parent authorities