CONGESTION FUNCTION SPECIFICATION AND THE PUBLICNESS OF LOCAL PUBLIC-GOODS

This paper is about the measurement of congestion within the median voter demand framework. The model of congestion traditionally used in the literature and four others are compared and tested in a median voter framework. The results show that a more flexible functional form which imposes fewer a priori restrictions on the data does at least as good a job of explaining variations in local government expenditures. Furthermore, it is shown that measured "publicness" of local public goods depends entirely on the a priori restrictions imposed on the congestion function. © 1990.