Many economic processes are influenced by externalities within groups. Educational outcomes depend on peer-group interactions between students, which may help explain the persistence of income inequality and the stability of subcultures and social classes.' Crime rates exhibit a geographic pattern that strongly suggests the presence of interactions between potential criminals. There is also substantial evidence that amenities are influenced by interactions between neighbors, and that interactions between firms influence labor productivity.2 This paper considers how social interactions affect the institutions of local government. Specifically, we show how social interactions encourage consumers to withdraw from the traditional public sector and join exclusive groups that regulate the activities of their members. Examples include familiar organizations like exclusive suburbs and private schools and new or newly popular institutions like private governments and charter schools. Each of these institutions mediates social interactions by excluding some agents and altering the actions of others. We view the formation of these institutions as a kind of secession, since members withdraw from the civic whole and limit their interactions to other group members. These new organizations are increasingly important, surprisingly powerful, and highly controversial. One of the most widespread innovations in local government in recent years has been the rise of residential private government, including common interest developments (CIDs) and homeowner associations (HOAs). Evan McKenzie (1996) reports that the number of CIDs in the United States grew from a few hundred in the 1960's to 150,000 in 1993, and that their populations now total at least 32 million people. CIDs and HOAs are generally formed by real estate developers, and are eventually governed by an elected board of members. CIDs limit interactions with the rest of the world in a number of ways, most notoriously by building walls (Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, 1997). They tax their members to pay for the local public services they provide (primarily street maintenance, trash collection, and policing), collectively own and manage shared facilities (recreation centers, parks, and sometimes streets), and regulate both property use and individual conduct through covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CCRs) established by the developer. The regulatory activities of CIDs are impressive. Activities that have been prohibited include flying the flag, delivering newspapers, parking pickup trucks in the driveway, kissing outside the front door, using one's own back door too much, building fences, painting the exterior certain colors, having pets, working from one's home, marrying people below a certain age, and even having children (McKenzie, 1996 p. 4). In spite of, or perhaps because of, these regulations, CIDs provide a higher level of amenities than is available in public developments. However, critics view them as undemocratic and discriminatory private governments operating outside the constitutional restrictions that public governments face. A primary goal of this paper is to provide a model that captures the common and general features of the new institutions of local government. To that end, we develop a model of local secession motivated by social interactions and supported by regulation. The model has three essential elements. First, heterogeneous agents belong to groups, and each takes an action that * Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, 2053 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2 Canada. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of British Columbia Centre for Real Estate and Urban Land Economics, and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia. We also appreciate the comments of David Wildasin, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the 1996 University of British Columbia Summer Symposium on Urban Land Economics. 1See Anita A. Summers and Barbara L. Wolfe (1977), J. Vernon Henderson et al. (1978), Roland B6nabou (1993, 1996), Steven N. Durlauf (1996), and George A. Akerlof (1997). 2 See Joseph Gyourko and Joseph Tracy (1991), Raaj Sah (1991), William N. Evans et al. (1992), Charles F. Manski (1993), Edward L. Glaeser et al. (1996), and John M. Ouigley (1998).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's (1898) and Economics stands as a landmark in the feminist economic analysis of gender relations and increasingly is also recognized as a pioneering work of American institutionalist economics (see Mary Ann Dimand, 1995). Because it stands out so strongly as a major contribution, and Economics has been perceived as an isolated work, apart from links to Lester Ward's sociology and parallels with the contemporary writings of Thorstein Veblen. This paper, however, views and Economics as the culmination of four decades of American feminist economic thought, beginning with Caroline Dall and Virginia Penny, and draws attention to Gilman's connection with that tradition through Helen Campbell. This tradition is so little known that the names of these four women do not even appear in Dorothy Ross's (1991) excellent Origins of American Social Science, even though Dall founded the American Social Science Association (ASSA), referred to by Ross (1991 p. 63) as the mother of associations, including the American Economic Association, and even though Campbell won a prize from the American Economic Association for Wage-Earners (Campbell, 1893), which was published with an introduction by Richard T. Ely. Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912) first became interested in feminism in 1837-1838 as a result of Harriet Martineau's (1837) chapter on The Political Non-existence of Women in the United States and an address on women's rights given at the Boston Lyceum by Amasa Walker, an underground railway activist soon to become professor of political economy at Oberlin. In 1841, Dall (then Caroline Healey) attended a series of ten weekly conversations led by the feminist author Margaret Fuller, publishing her notes of these conversations more than half a century later. While teaching school in Georgetown in the early 1840's before her marriage, she undertook the first census of free blacks in the District of Columbia, in order to organize schools for them, and in the early 1850s, while living in Toronto (where her husband was a Unitarian minister), she acted as Canadian agent for a society aiding fugitive slaves. Dall remained in her native Boston with her two children when her husband sailed to India as a missionary (where he stayed for the remaining 30 years of his life). She reported to a women's rights convention in Boston in 1855 on the legal status of women, following with a series of annual reports on that status, and with organization of the New England Rights Convention in Boston in 1859. A precursor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman among American feminists, Dall went beyond the suffrage question and unequal laws on property rights to a critique of the economic role of women in a series of three public lectures in Boston in November 1859, published as Woman's Right to Labor; or Low Wages and Hard Work (1860). Together with two series of lectures on women's right to education and rights under the law, this series was incorporated in Dall's major work, College, the Market, and the Courts; or Women's Relation to Education, Labor, and the Law (1867). Dall (1867 [1972 p. 179]) attributed women' s discontent to restricted opportunities for paid employment, for it was no longer the case that every woman found, in spinning, weaving, and sewing in the active life of a ... household, full employment for time and thought. In moving from a survey of women's unequal legal status to a critique of women' s repressed economic role, Dall followed the same path as the British activist Barbara Bodichon (whose 1859 pamphlet, and Work, appeared in a revised American edition in 1959) and, later, Jeanne Chauvin (1892) in France. * Department of Economics, Brock University, St. Ca tharines, Ontario L2S 3A1, Canada (e-mail: dimandCc adam.econ.brocku.ca).

The U.S. economy has expanded rapidly in recent years, with total factor productivity (the source of growth most closely identified with technological gains) rising sharply since the mid-1990’s (see e.g., Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1999; William Gullickson and Michael J. Harper, 1999; Mun S. Ho et al., 1999; Daniel E. Sichel, 1999). This strong aggregate performance and the well-documented explosion of investment in computers and other high-tech equipment have led many to believe that the United States has experienced a permanent, technology-led growth revival. It is essential, however, to disaggregate estimates of economic growth to the industry level to understand the new trends in the U.S. economy. Productivity growth, the ability to produce more outputs from the same inputs, differs widely among industries. For the economy as a whole, negative productivity growth in one industry can offset positive productivity growth in another, and Jorgenson (1990) shows that a measure of productivity based solely on aggregate data is valid only under very stringent conditions. We avoid the limitations of an aggregate measure of productivity by decomposing U.S. growth across industries for the period 1958–1996. By breaking down the U.S. economy into 37 industries (35 private industries, private households, and general government), we identify the contribution of each industry to aggregate productivity growth. This enables us to isolate the underlying sources of gains in productivity and provides a better understanding of the forces driving the U.S. economy. Economy-wide productivity from an aggregate production function increased 0.45 percent per year during 1958–1996, while methodology developed by Evsey Domar (1961) for aggregating over industries yields an aggregate estimate of 0.48 percent. Over the same period, however, industry productivity growth ranged from 1.98 percent in Electronic and Electric Equipment to 20.52 percent in Government Enterprises, highlighting fundamental differences in technology and productivity growth across industries. These results show that the aggregate production function provides a reasonable estimate of productivity trends over long periods but also masks important differences among industries.

In early 1999, the mayor of New York City announced a plan for exporting most of his city’s waste (about 13,000 tons per day) to other states. The responses escalated an already growing war of words about interstate waste shipments. A Pennsylvania state legislator bluntly called the mayor’s plan “irresponsible,” and the governor of New Jersey labeled it “a direct assault” on her state. A spokesperson for New York City’s Department of Sanitation coolly staked out the City’s position: “You can’t stop interstate commerce. ... If Virginia is the least expensive place to deliver this solid waste, then that is where it is going to go.” The response was swift: various legislators joined environmental activists to send 50 pounds of trash to the mayor’s office. Led by the governor’s efforts, the Virginia General Assembly subsequently responded with proposed legislation to restrict significantly imports of waste (see R. H. Melton, 1998). Virginia’s legislative proposal came on the heels of numerous similar proposals by other states to which large shipments of waste are transported. Interstate shipments of waste involve almost the entire nation (47 states export waste, and 44 states import waste) and represent nearly $1 billion annually in disposal and transportation fees. Since the early 1990’s, these shipments have increased by more than 30 percent. As officials in importing states have sought to curb these flows, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down their proposed restrictions as violations of the Interstate Commerce Clause. In response, the Congress has advanced proposals to exempt waste from jurisdiction of that clause. To date, however, very little is known about the positive and normative effects of the various proposals to restrict municipal solid-waste transshipments. How are the effects of restrictions likely to be distributed among the owners of waste-disposal facilities and the users of these services? Given that the Northeast is a net exporter and the Midwest is a net importer of waste, are the effects likely to differ among regions of the country? In this paper we model the interstate market for municipal solid waste and evaluate the potential economic effects of public policies proposed to restrict waste flows. These restrictions include local and state requirements stipulating where waste must be landfilled, prohibitions on the import or export of waste across state boundaries, quantitative limits on these flows, and extra fees levied on imported waste. To our knowledge, this research is the first to evaluate these proposals quantitatively. We develop both a conceptual and a computable economic model of the use over time of spatially differentiated resources, characteristics which well describe the nation’s landfill facilities (landfills, rather than recycling or other disposal options, are the dominant destination of most interstate shipments). The model characterizes the efficient intertemporal allocation of spatially distributed waste-disposal capacity among users who are also spatially distributed. In addition,