The Experts below are selected from a list of 288 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Stephen Coate - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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centralized versus decentralized provision of Local Public Goods a political economy analysis
Journal of Public Economics, 2003Co-Authors: Timothy Besley, Stephen CoateAbstract:This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of Local Public Goods. The point of departure is to model a centralized system as one in which Public spending is financed by general taxation, but districts can receive different levels of Local Public Goods. In a world of benevolent governments, the disadvantages of centralization stressed in the existing literature disappear, suggesting that the case for decentralization must be driven by political economy considerations. Our political economy analysis assumes that under decentralization Public Goods are selected by Locally elected representatives, while under a centralized system policy choices are determined by a legislature consisting of elected representatives from each district. We then study the role of taste heterogeneity, spillovers and legislative behavior in determining the case for centralization.
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centralized versus decentralized provision of Local Public Goods a political economy approach
Journal of Public Economics, 2003Co-Authors: Timothy Besley, Stephen CoateAbstract:Abstract This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of Local Public Goods. It argues that the sharing of the costs of Local Public spending in a centralized system will create a conflict of interest between citizens in different jurisdictions. When spending decisions are made by a legislature of Locally elected representatives, this conflict of interest will play out in the legislature. Depending on precisely how the legislature behaves, the result may be excessive Public spending or allocations of Public Goods characterized by uncertainty and misallocation across districts. The extent of the conflict of interest between districts is affected by spillovers and differences in tastes for Public spending. Thus, the relative performance of centralized and decentralized systems depends upon spillovers and differences in tastes for Public spending, but for different reasons than suggested in the existing literature.
Timothy Besley - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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centralized versus decentralized provision of Local Public Goods a political economy analysis
Journal of Public Economics, 2003Co-Authors: Timothy Besley, Stephen CoateAbstract:This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of Local Public Goods. The point of departure is to model a centralized system as one in which Public spending is financed by general taxation, but districts can receive different levels of Local Public Goods. In a world of benevolent governments, the disadvantages of centralization stressed in the existing literature disappear, suggesting that the case for decentralization must be driven by political economy considerations. Our political economy analysis assumes that under decentralization Public Goods are selected by Locally elected representatives, while under a centralized system policy choices are determined by a legislature consisting of elected representatives from each district. We then study the role of taste heterogeneity, spillovers and legislative behavior in determining the case for centralization.
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centralized versus decentralized provision of Local Public Goods a political economy approach
Journal of Public Economics, 2003Co-Authors: Timothy Besley, Stephen CoateAbstract:Abstract This paper takes a fresh look at the trade-off between centralized and decentralized provision of Local Public Goods. It argues that the sharing of the costs of Local Public spending in a centralized system will create a conflict of interest between citizens in different jurisdictions. When spending decisions are made by a legislature of Locally elected representatives, this conflict of interest will play out in the legislature. Depending on precisely how the legislature behaves, the result may be excessive Public spending or allocations of Public Goods characterized by uncertainty and misallocation across districts. The extent of the conflict of interest between districts is affected by spillovers and differences in tastes for Public spending. Thus, the relative performance of centralized and decentralized systems depends upon spillovers and differences in tastes for Public spending, but for different reasons than suggested in the existing literature.
Caroline M. Hoxby - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The Productivity of Schools and Other Local Public Goods Providers
1999Co-Authors: Caroline M. HoxbyAbstract:I construct an agency model of Local Public Goods producers with special reference to Public schools. The model assumes that households make Tiebout choices among jurisdictions, but it has more realistic assumptions about information and the cost of residential mobility. I examine producers' effort and rent under Local property tax finance and centralized finance. I show that, if there are a sufficient number of jurisdictions to choose among, conventional Local property tax finance substantially reduces the agency problem and associated loss of productivity. Specifically, I demonstrate that Local property tax finance can attain about as much productivity as a social planner with centralized finance can, even if the social planner is armed with more information that a real social planner could plausibly have. The key insight is that decentralized Tiebout choices make some information the social planner would need verifiable and other information unnecessary.
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The productivity of schools and other Local Public Goods producers
Journal of Public Economics, 1999Co-Authors: Caroline M. HoxbyAbstract:Abstract I construct an agency model of Local Public Goods producers in which households make Tiebout choices among jurisdictions in a world of imperfect information and costly residential mobility. I examine producers’ effort and rent under Local property tax finance and centralized finance. I show that, if there are a sufficient number of jurisdictions, conventional Local property tax finance can attain about as much productivity as a social planner with centralized finance can, even if the social planner is armed with more information than a real social planner could plausibly have. The key insight is that decentralized Tiebout choices make some information the social planner would need verifiable and other information unnecessary .
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Is There an Equity-Efficiency Trade-Off in School Finance? Tiebout and a Theory of the Local Public Goods Producer
1995Co-Authors: Caroline M. HoxbyAbstract:New empirical work shows the degree of competition among Public providers of Local Public Goods or between Public and private providers of Local Public Goods matters. This evidence needs a theory of the Local Public Goods producer. Tiebout's hypothesis spawned a literature that gives Local Public economics a useful theory of the consumer which can generate a theory of the Local Public Goods producer. This potential has remained largely undeveloped apart from Tiebout's vision of the Local Public Goods producer as an entrepreneur, which is unrealistic because Local Public Goods are nonverifiable. The Tiebout mechanism does not operate in alternative models of the Local Public Goods producer, such as bureaucracy and agenda models. None of these models is useful for predicting how Local Public Goods producers react to policies that change the structure of Local Public finance. This paper builds a theory of the producer that draws upon Tiebout's mechanism and the theory of incentives for regulation. I find that Tiebout's mechanism generates information that can be used in regulatory schemes to achieve lower costs for any given provision of Local Public Goods. Thus, we face a fundamental trade-off between promoting equitable consumption of the Public good and promoting efficiency in production of the Public good. This trade-off exists even when equity in consumption generates positive externalities, as is often suggested of the consumption of schooling. I present evidence that when the Tiebout mechanism for schools is weakened by state-level school funding, per-pupil costs rise and the growth of educational attainment falls. This implies that losses from inefficient production generally outweigh gains from equalized consumption.
Guang-zhen Sun - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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When Does Everyone Contribute in the Private Provision of Local Public Goods
Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2012Co-Authors: Guang-zhen SunAbstract:When does everyone genuinely contribute in the private provision of a Local Public good? We first introduce a monotonic condition to characterize the relationship between the structure of the network that underlie the noncooperative game of private provision of Local Public Goods on the one hand, and the preferences of the agents on the other, showing that the monotonic condition is a sufficient and necessary condition of existence of a distributed Nash equilibrium (DNE) in which each agent exerts a positive amount of effort to provision of the Public good (Theorem 1). We then study the number of equilibria, and, by using the monotonic condition, characterize the condition under which the DNE set is a singleton, a continuum, or null (Theorem 2). As it turns out, the structure of the network and the agents’ preferences jointly shape the effort profile in the provision of Local Public Goods.
Benjamin A Olken - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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direct democracy and Local Public Goods evidence from a field experiment in indonesia
American Political Science Review, 2010Co-Authors: Benjamin A OlkenAbstract:This brief summarizes the direct democracy and Local Public Goods: evidence from a field experiment in Indonesia for September 2005-January 2006. This article presents an experiment in which 49 Indonesian villages were randomly assigned to choose development projects through either representative-based meetings or direct election-based plebiscites. Plebiscites resulted in dramatically higher satisfaction among villagers, increased knowledge about the project, greater perceived benefits, and higher reported willingness to contribute. Changing the political mechanism had much smaller effects on the actual projects selected, with some evidence that plebiscites resulted in projects chosen by women being located in poorer areas. The results suggest that direct participation in political decision making can substantially increase satisfaction and legitimacy.