Advanced Urban Public Finance: Collective Action and Provisions of Local Public Goods
This MIT graduate seminar rethinks local public finance by putting collective action problems at the center instead of treating taxation and spending as the whole story. The first half examines how failures to act collectively block the internalization of positive externalities that public goods generate. The second half surveys institutional alternatives to conventional public finance for funding local services, especially under fiscal stress from financial crises. Case applications cover public health, education, and natural resource conservation, testing whether newer collective-action frameworks can do work that standard tax-and-spend models cannot. Materials come from MIT OpenCourseWare and include the syllabus, readings, and assignments used in the actual seminar, free to access with no certificate offered. The course suits students who already have grounding in public economics and want to see the field's core assumptions challenged rather than restated.