Contemporary issues in empirical public finance

This paper provides a brief overview to how the use of game theory and its derivative theories of information and incentives in public finance have expanded economists' methodological toolkit for predicting how procedural aspects influence strategies of participants as well as their overall performance. Moreover given that evaluation of public policy options, where policy failures can and do occur due to either inadequate incentive structure or the presence of constitutional and behavioural constraints, the objective of the essays in this symposium is to indicate the richness and diversity of empirical approaches that have been used to shed quantitative light on applied public finance issues. First version received: May 1999/final version received: June 1999