This paper examines the segregative properties of Tiebout-like endogenous processes of jurisdiction formation in presence of a competitive land market. In the model considered, a continuum of households with di¤erent wealth levels and the same preferences for local public goods, private spending and housing choose a location from a …nite set. Each location has an initial endowment of housing th...

Public colleges and universities may soon lose the freedom to consider race in their admissions processes. In California and Washington, voters have required colleges to abandon affirmative action, and in Texas, a federal court decision has virtually eliminated the use of racial preferences in college admissions. At the University of Michigan, preferences—established on historical, moral, and e...

This report summarizes the results of the Illinois Education Research Council’s (IERC) survey with Illinois principals conducted in November 2010. The purpose of the survey, and of this report, is to help researchers, policymakers, and practitioners better understand the work that Illinois principals do and their preferences and priorities regarding this work. We received responses from 877 par...

This paper studies how the level of the public good and the amounts of taxes are determined in a bargaining model. Using the Nash bargaining solution as the solution concept, the paper shows that the nature of individuals’ preferences over the public good and private good determines the nature of the tax regime. In particular, the paper characterizes conditions on preferences under which the Na...

Do preferences toward globalization strategies vary across publicfinance regimes? In this paper, we use data on individual preferences toward immigration and trade policy to examine how pre-tax and posttax cleavages differ across globalization strategies and state fiscal jurisdictions. High exposure to immigrant fiscal pressures reduces support for freer immigration among U.S. natives, especial...

The paper studies bidder behavior in simultaneous, continuous, ascending price auctions. We design and implement a ‘‘collusion incubator’’ environment based on a type of public, symmetrically ‘‘folded’’ and ‘‘item-aligned’’ preferences. Tacit collusion develops quickly and reliably within the environment. Once tacit collusion developed, it proved remarkably robust to institutional changes that ...

Democracy functions as a system with formal and informal institutional interrelated mechanisms serving the purpose of translating social preferences into public policies. Enhancing the effectiveness of society’s dispute resolution mechanisms is also a way to address social preferences through public policies within the judicial domain.1 Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that the institutions...

We study a large economy model in which individuals have private information about their productive abilities and their preferences for public goods. A mechanism design approach is used to characterize implementable tax and expenditure policies. A robustness requirement in the sense of Bergemann and Morris (2005) yields individual incentive compatibility constraints that are equivalent to those...

This paper studies how a politician’s preferences and abilities to influence public and private sector productivity affect her choices over economic policies. Extremism between policies of leftand right-wing incumbents increases with ability, because voters are more willing to re-elect competent politicians. Positive correlations between certain ability dimensions and preferences amplify politi...

Societies prohibit many transactions considered morally repugnant, although potentially efficiency-enhancing. We conducted an online choice experiment to characterize preferences for the morality and efficiency of payments to kidney donors. Preferences were heterogeneous, ranging from deontological to strongly consequentialist; the median respondent would support payments by a public agency if ...