Energy poverty is a topic often neglected in the discussion about global climate change. Apocalyptic prophecies about the negative future effects of climate change ignore the suffering of people around the globe whose lives could be drastically improved with access to reliable sources of energy. Though energy poverty from a global perspective is much more serious than energy poverty from a domestic perspective, high home energy bills are a serious cause for concern for many Americans. This research examines the relationship between regulation, the prices of electricity and natural gas, and the household energy burden, which is the ratio of household energy expenditures to household income. Where the household energy burden exceeds six percent of household income, households are at the brink of living with a high household energy burden. High household energy burdens can become a generational poverty trap, so understanding what contributes to a high household energy burden may help decision makers determine how to proceed when shaping energy-related and poverty-related policy.

Home rule power gives local governments greater authority to obtain and manage fiscal resources and determine the distribution and extent of public services. By design, this authority alters government outcomes. The vast decentralization and local government structure literature examining horizontal and vertical competition demonstrates the complexity of predicting the effect of home rule on government sector size. Adding to the complexity, home rule is fundamentally distinct from decentralization. Home rule power gives local governments greater fiscal, structural, and functional authority, while state governments may retain partial authority. This can result in duplication of revenue generation and service provision. Under the leviathan hypothesis direct and indirect constitutional constraints are necessary to control government expansion. State restrictions on home rule authority may serve as a form of direct constitutional constraint that has been overlooked in the economic literature. This dissertation uses 1990 and 2000 Census data to empirically test home rule and other institutional factors’ effects on government size. The results of the studies in this dissertation confirm that home rule relaxes a constraint on government size, finding that home rule states tend to have larger government sectors. The empirical evidence supporting the role of institutions in public sector performance is a primary contribution of this dissertation

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This thesis clarifies, develops, and applies Brennan and Buchanan's concept of robust political economy.

Essays in Constitutional Economics uses the theoretical tools developed in public choice and constitutional economics to analyze how institutions of various sorts influence the individual choice calculus. Institutions are seen as formal and informal rules that can be evaluated and, although oftentimes durable, reformed. The primary purpose of institutions is to guide and constrain human behavior in a world characterized by uncertainty and self-interested motives, such that human actions are more conducive to long-term, aggregate preference satisfaction. The first essay, "Social Order through Constitutional Choice: A Contractarian Proposal," introduces a normative criterion for legitimate constitutional change, based in James Buchanan’s brand of contractarianism, and proceeds to outline a specific constitutional proposal. The proposed constitution consists of a common core, representing Nozick’s minimal state, and a set of subconstitutions between which citizens can choose, irrespective of geographic location, and which encompass different scopes of government. The second essay, "Rhetoric or Reality? An Economic Analysis of the Effects of Religion in Sweden," views religious beliefs, themselves taken as given, as entailing moral positions, here seen as informal institutions, which influence behavior in a predictable fashion. An empirical study of divorce rates, rates of children born out of wedlock, abortion rates, and rates of not paying one’s debts in Swedish municipalities reveal that the stronger the religious involvement, the less of these particular behaviors is seen. Interestingly, the negative influence of involvement in the Lutheran state church is greater, on the margin, than the negative influence stemming from involvement in (generally more conservative) independent churches. The third essay, "Economic Freedom and Equality: Friends or Foes?" looks at economic policies as sets of variable institutions which influence economic activities, and thereby efficiency and the income distribution, in various ways. A cross-country study reveals that economic freedom, defined in the form of an index measuring such things as tax pressure, protection of property rights, a functioning judicial system, low inflation, and freedom to trade, can be positively related to income equality. This holds in developing countries when economic freedom is increased over a longer time period in a stable manner and when the increase is the result of trade and capital-flow liberalization. Then, the poor seem to be able to take advantage of the freer economy to a larger extent than those who are better off. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögsk.

Proefschrift Unversiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Calif., California Inst. of Technology, Diss.--Pasadena, 2003. / Kopie, ersch. im Verl. UMI, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Univ., Diss.--Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Mass., Harvard Univ., Diss.--Cambridge, 2003. / Kopie, ersch. im Verl. UMI, Ann Arbor, Mich.

University, Fak. für Wirtschaftswiss., Diss.--Magdeburg, 2005.