Market failure, government failure, and the private supply of public goods: The case of climate-controlled walkway networks

Two opposing models of public-goods undersupply are those of "market failur e'' and "government failure''. Empirical work on the relative explanatory p ower of these two frameworks has been limited by the scarcity of acceptable data. The case of climate-controlled walkways in major urban cores is a ra re instance where such difficulties can be overcome. We investigate the sup ply of CCWs in 55 large city-cores in North America. We find that (1) CCW n etworks are well-supplied by market forces, when (2) such forces are not fr ustrated by government policy. We also find evidence that (3) rules-based r egimes dominate discretion-based regimes. These results are consistent with the position that the "government-failure'' paradigm is a viable alternati ve to the traditional "market failure'' paradigm.