Institutional Collective Action and Economic Development Joint Ventures

There is high interest in economic development efforts involving cooperation or collaboration among metropolitan jurisdictions. To determine why some local governments engage in cooperative agreements while others do not, this paper investigates transaction obstacles, including bargaining, information, agency, enforcement, and division problems. The authors then advance an institutional collective action explanation for intergovernmental cooperation, focusing on the conditions under which these transactions costs are low. This work anticipates that the costs associated with interlocal cooperation are influenced by the demographic characteristics of communities, local political institutions, and the nature of regional government networks. Empirical analysis based on a national survey of local development officials provides support for several predictions from this model and identifies policy variables that, in turn, increase the prospects for cooperation, specifically through the development of informal policy networks.     

THE USE OF BARGAINING GAMES IN LOCAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY

Granting location incentives is a common city policy to attract new businesses, despite the frequent belief that the benefits are too generous. Can cities do a better job determining when to agree to these concessions and when to refuse? I argue that analyzing the concession decision with a simple bargaining game illustrates: (1) that the negotiation strategy a city uses should be based on the characteristics of the firm in each case and (2) that even poor cities with few attractive location features can avoid making large concessions. Development experiences in Miami‐Dade are used to illustrate the model.     

Metropolitan Governance: Voter Support and State Legislative Prospects

With increased public attention to the problems in both centralcities and suburban areas, the feasibility of metropolitan governanceis being considered again. Myron Orfield's work on regionalcooperation in Minneapolis-St. Paul has suggested that statelegislative action can be used to achieve that outcome. However,state legislators are unlikely to promote regional policiesunless they have some evidence their constituents support them.This article uses election data from California propositionsto test the connection that Orfield asserts between demographiccomposition of an area and voter support for regional issues.The data suggest several shortcomings of his model, includingthat race or ethnicity and the diversity of an area substantiallyaffect the outcome in ways he did not consider.