America’s local governments spend about one-eighth of our national income, one-fourth of total government spending, and employ over 14 million people. This paper surveys the large and growing economics literature on local governments and their finances. A primary difference between local and national government is the ease of labor mobility within countries, which disciplines local governments ...

Recent years have seen a large expansion in the use of rigorous impact evaluation techniques. Increasingly, public administrations are collaborating with academic economists and other quantitative social scientists to apply such rigorous methods to the study of public finance. These developments allow for more reliable measurements of the effects of different policy options on the behavioral re...

Borrowing from existing results, in particular Hart (2003), the authors argue that the benefits of PPPs to society lie only in efficiency gains in production (e.g. bundling and cost-cutting incentives) and allocation (e.g. improvements in the quality and quantity of infrastructure). They conclude that risk transfer to the private sector is most justified when the risk is endogenous (i.e. it is ...