Public goods, voting, and growth

Voting, Punishment, and Public Goods

Researchers have found that voting can help increase voluntary contributions to a public good—provided enforcement through a third party. Not all collective agreements, however, guarantee third-party enforcement. We design an experiment to explore whether a voting rule with and without endogenous punishment increases contributions to a public good. Our results suggest that voting by itself does...

Voting for Public Goods with

Strategy-proof Voting for Multiple Public Goods

In a voting model where the set of feasible alternatives is a subset of a product set A = A1 × ·· · × Am of m finite categories, we characterize the set of all strategy-proof social choice functions for three different types of preference domains over A, namely for the domains of additive, completely separable, and weakly separable preferences over A.

Endogenous growth in a model with heterogeneous agents and voting on public goods

The spatial range of public goods revealed through referendum voting

Billions of dollars are now spent annually in the United States and Europe for spatially delineated environmental services such as agricultural landscape management and river restoration programs, yet little is known about the spatial distribution of the benefits from these policies. This paper develops a framework for recovering information on this question from the spatial pattern of votes ca...