Parochial Interests and the Centralized Provision of Local Public Goods: Evidence from Congressional Voting on Transportation Projects

Brian Knight

No 9748, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Local public goods financed from a national tax base provide concentrated benefits to receipient jurisdictions but disperse costs, creating incentives for legislators to increase own-district spending but to restrain aggregate spending due to the associated tax costs. While these common pool incentives underpin a variety of theoretical analyses, which tend to predict inefficiencies in the allocation of public goods, there is little direct evidence that individual legislators respond to such incentives. To test for reactions to such incentives, this paper analyzes 1998 Congressional votes over transportation project funding. The empirical results provide evidence that legislators respond to common pool incentives: the probability of supporting the projects is increasing in own-district spending and decreasing in the tax burden associated with aggregate spending. Having found that legislators do respond to such incentives, I use the parameter estimates to calculate the efficient level of public goods, which suggest over-spending in aggregate, especially in politically powerful districts, and large associated deadweight loss.

JEL-codes: H4 H7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pbe and nep-ure
Note: PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as Knight, Brian. "Parochial Interests And The Centralized Provision Of Local Public Goods: Evidence From Congressional Voting On Transportation Projects," Journal of Public Economics, 2004, v88(3-4,Mar), 845-866.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9748.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Parochial interests and the centralized provision of local public goods: evidence from congressional voting on transportation projects (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9748

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9748

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().