Laboratories of Democracy: Policy Experimentation under Decentralization
研究了地方和国家政治家因职业考虑而进行政策实验的模型，发现分权下地方政治家更倾向于尝试多样化政策，但分权对福利的影响取决于地区间的同质性。
We develop a model of policy experimentation in which the policy decisions of local and national politicians are driven by career concerns. When politicians’ payoffs are convex in their reputation and policy-making is opaque, local politicians experiment by introducing more diverse policies than national politicians do. The welfare implications of decentralization depend on homogeneity between districts. In particular, learning about policies is greater under decentralization if and only if the districts are sufficiently homogeneous. The model delivers novel testable hypotheses. Decentralization should be positively correlated with more diverse (uniform) local policies among countries with opaque (transparent) policymaking.