Public Goods Theories and Evidence

This book is a broad survey of the literature on public goods. There has been an explosion of research in the last ten years in a broad variety of - eas in this literature and the time seems right for a survey of this work. This includes the recent work on dynamic theories of public goods, s- ond-best financing methods, surveys and contingent valuation in determ- ing the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for public goods, voting models, p- vately produced public goods, charity and national radio, experiments on public goods, public inputs, public capital and infrastructure, the Tiebout sorting mechanism, local public goods (LPGs), club goods, and fiscal competition and coordination. We survey developments in the theory and the empirical work in each area. We also present the classic results to place the new developments in context. This book is appropriate for advanced undergraduates, graduate students who wish to learn the latest research in this area, and for practitioners who want to broaden their knowledge outside their own area of expertise. We present the background for each result and try to give the reader a feel for how a particular area of the literature developed. The technical results are provided and an intuitive explanation for them is also given. We also p- sent some new results in many of the chapters as well. Each chapter is r- sonably self-contained.