The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a fiscal common-pool problem in a Japanese local government. Especially, we focus on the relationship between council size and land development expenditure of local government using a dataset of 13,989 municipalities in Japan from FY2001 to FY2006. We...

The number of municipalities in Japan has decreased from 3,232 in 1999 to 1,820 in 2006 because of municipal mergers, called Heisei-no-Daigappei. This paper estimates the effects of municipal mergers in Japan’s local public expenditure. In order to evaluate the expenditure of municipal...

This paper considers the possible effects of broader-based local government, especially extended associations, in Japanese local public finance. In order to evaluate the expenditure of extended association, our new approach is to apply unique index called financial index classified by similar...

This paper considers the possible effects of broader-based local government, especially extended associations, in Japanese local public finance. We mainly analyze scale effects in public long-term care insurance expenditure, with our results indicating a U shaped expenditure structure. We also...

This paper considers the possible effects of broader-based local government, especially extended associations, in Japanese local public finance. In order to evaluate the expenditure of extended association, our new approach is to apply unique index called financial index classified by similar...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate an effect of new fiscal rules in the Japanese prefectural government. Especially, we focus on creative accounting [von Hagen and Wolff (2006)] in the Law Relating to the Financial Soundness of Local Governments (2007, Law No. 94). We estimated the effect...

This paper analyze the structure of the standard fiscal needs (SFN) of local allocation tax grants in Japanese prefectural data. The previous works on SFN reported that the scale effect of SFN (a U shaped per capita SFN curve) are observed in Japan. We mainly showed the per capita SFN has the...

In order to evaluate a fiscal common-pool problem, this paper focuses on the relationship between local government council size and its expenditure. Generally, local councilors internalize the benefit of public projects targeted at their political jurisdictions, but underestimate and prefer to...