Abstract.  Over the past 30 years, the share of adult populations with college degrees increased more in cities with higher initial schooling levels than in initially less educated places. This tendency appears to be driven by shifts in labor demand as there is an increasing wage premium for skilled people working in skilled cities. In this article, we present a model where the clustering of skilled people in metropolitan areas is driven by the tendency of skilled entrepreneurs to innovate in ways that employ other skilled people and by the elasticity of housing supply.

Scholarship on distributive politics focuses almost exclusively on the internal operations of Congress, paying particular attention to committees and majority parties. This article highlights the president, who has extensive opportunities, both ex ante and ex post, to influence the distribution of federal outlays. We analyze two databases that track the geographic spending of nearly every domestic program over a 24-year period—the largest and most comprehensive panels of federal spending patterns ever assembled. Using district and county fixed-effects estimation strategies, we find no evidence of committee influence and mixed evidence that majority party members receive larger shares of federal outlays. We find that districts and counties receive systematically more federal outlays when legislators in the president's party represent them.

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For too long, research on retrospective voting has fixated on how economic trends affect incumbents' electoral prospects in national and state elections. Hundreds of thousands of elections in the United States occur at the local level and have little to do with unemployment or inflation rates. This paper focuses on the most prevalent: school boards. Specifically, it examines whether voters hold school board members accountable for the performance of their schools. The 2000 elections reveal considerable evidence that voters evaluate school board members on the basis of student learning trends. During the 2002 and 2004 school board elections, however, when media (and by extension public) attention to testing and accountability systems drifted, measures of achievement did not influence incumbents' electoral fortunes. These findings, we suggest, raise important questions about both the scope conditions of retrospective voting models and the information voters rely upon when evaluating incumbents.

If voters are biased against female candidates, only the most talented, hardest working female candidates will succeed in the electoral process. Furthermore, if women perceive there to be sex discrimination in the electoral process, or if they underestimate their qualifications for office, then only the most qualified, politically ambitious females will emerge as candidates. We argue that when either or both forms of sex-based selection are present, the women who are elected to office will perform better, on average, than their male counterparts. We test this central implication of our theory by studying the relative success of men and women in delivering federal spending to their districts and in sponsoring legislation. Analyzing changes within districts over time, we find that congresswomen secure roughly 9% more spending from federal discretionary programs than congressmen. Women also sponsor and cosponsor significantly more bills than their male colleagues. W omen are a minority in legislatures across the United States. In 2010, women held only 17% of the seats in each chamber of Congress and 24% in state legislatures (CAWP 2009). 1 Granted, women have made advances in politics in recent decades, but even today 11% of American adults openly admit that they would not vote for a woman for president (Newport and Carroll 2007). Moreover, qualified women express greater hesitation about running for office than similarly qualified men (Fox and Lawless 2004).In this article, we draw a connection between models of political agency and the economics of discrimination, linking both to the vast literature on women in politics. We propose that the process of selection into office is different for women than it is for men, resulting in important differences in the performance of male and female legislators once they are elected. This phenomenon, which we call "sex-based selection," can occur in one or both of two ways: First, if voters discriminate against female candidates, only the most talented, hardest working female Sarah F. Anzia is a Ph.D. candidate, four anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.1 Replication data and code for the analyses contained in this article can be found at http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/faculty/webpages/christopher-berry.asp. candidates will win elections. Second, if women in the political eligibility pool underestimate their qualifications for office, or if women perceive there to be sex discrimination in the electoral process, then only the most qualified, politically ambitious females will emerge as candidates. We argue that when either or both forms of sex-based selection are present, the women who run and win office will perform better, on average, than their male counterparts. We test this proposition by evaluating the success of congresswomen relative to congressmen in delivering federal dollars to the home district and in sponsoring legislation.The article proceeds as follows. The first section reviews the related literature. In the second section, we describe our ...

This article discusses the common-pool problems that arise when multiple territorially overlapping governments share the authority to provide services and levy taxes in a common geographic area. Contrary to the traditional Tiebout model in which increasing the number of competing governments improves efficiency, I argue that increasing the number of overlapping governments results in "overfishing" from the shared tax base. I test the model empirically using data from U.S. counties and find a strong positive relationship between the number of overlapping jurisdictions and the size of the local public sector. Substantively, the "overlap effect" amounts to roughly 10% of local revenue.

While many scholars have focused on the production of legislation, we explore life after enactment. Contrary to the prevailing view that federal programs are indissoluble, we show that programmatic restructurings and terminations are commonplace. In addition, we observe significant changes in programmatic appropriations. We suggest that a sitting congress is most likely to transform, kill, or cut programs inherited from an enacting congress when its partisan composition differs substantially. To test this claim, we examine the postenactment histories of every federal domestic program established between 1971 and 2003, using a new dataset that distinguishes program death from restructuring. Consistent with our predictions, we find that changes in the partisan composition of congresses have a strong influence on program durability and size. We thus dispel the notion that federal programs are everlasting while providing a plausible coalition-based account for their evolution. I f government's fundamental task is, as Harold Lasswell famously asserted (1936), to decide "who gets what, when, and how," then we should add, "and for how long." While much recent scholarship has focused on the production of legislation, relatively little has considered what happens to a program once elected officials have enacted it. It is not enough to characterize the course that a particular group of policy makers initially set. Scholars need to identify the enduring effects of policy makers' actions. We need to know whether their footprints were quickly washed away or left lasting imprints. Unfortunately, existing research yields few and often misleading conclusions about the trajectory of government programs.This article analyzes the durability and size of government programs, focusing on the effects of changes in the partisan composition of congresses over time. for helpful feedback on earlier drafts. We are indebted to Kenneth Bickers and Robert Stein for sharing their CFDA database. when the partisan compositions of the enacting and current congresses look much alike, a program should be less susceptible to legislative tinkering. However intuitive this logic might be, it runs against a long literature in public administration and so deserves careful empirical scrutiny.We therefore examine the size and survival of all federal government domestic programs established between 1971 and 2003 (2,059 programs in total, yielding 20,159 program-year observations). Consistent with our predictions, we find that changes in the partisan composition of congresses have a strong influence on both program durability and spending levels. Moreover, these effects are asymmetric: program life spans are regularly shortened by partisan losses, but lengthened by partisan gains; similarly, programmatic spending predictably declines after partisan losses, but increases after partisan gains. We thus dispel the dominant notion that federal programs are "immortal" while providing a plausible coalitionbased account of their varying life spans and spending traje...

Journalistic and academic accounts of Congress suggest that important committee positions allow members to procure more federal funds for their constituents, but existing evidence on this topic is limited in scope and has failed to distinguish the effects of committee membership from selection onto committees. We bring together decades of data on federal outlays and congressional committee and subcommittee assignments to provide a comprehensive analysis of committee positions and distributive politics across all policy domains. Using a within-member research design, we find that seats on key committees produce little additional spending. The chairs of the Appropriations subcommittees-the so called "cardinals" of Congress-are an exception to the rule. These leadership positions do generate more funding for constituents, but only from programs under the jurisdiction of their subcommittee. Our results paint a new picture of distributive politics and call for a reexamination of its canonical theories.