En el presente trabajo se avanzan una serie de recomendaciones para la reforma del sistema de financiación de las comunidades autónomas de régimen común. La primera de ellas tiene que ver con la estructura del sistema y con el reparto de recursos entre regiones. El resto se centran en...

This paper argues that the current Spanish system of regional financing does not adequately respect the principles of equality, autonomy, responsibility and transparency that should guide its design. It also advances a series of recommendations for the reform of the system that can be classified...

The paper investigates the intertemporal spending behavior of Scandinavian local governments with particular attention to liquidity constraints imposed by balanced-budget-rules and other regulations. The main finding is that Danish local governments are more able to smooth current expenditures...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of municipal labour demand in Sweden 1988-1995. Utilising a major grant reform in 1993, through which a switch from mainly targeted to mainly general central government grants occurred, we are able to identify which type of grants that have the...

In this paper, we develop an empirical framework for detecting the existence and estimating the magnitude of the softness of a budget constraint. The defining feature of a soft budget constraint is a subordinate organization’s expectations of being bailed out by a superior organization in case...

In their role as agenda setters and implementers of political decisions, bureaucrats potentially have the power to influence decisions in their own favor. It is however difficult to empirically test whether bureaucrats actually are involved in such actions. In this paper we suggest and apply a...

Sweden has undertaken major national reforms of its school sector which, consequently, has been classified as one of the most decentralized ones in the OECD. This paper investigates whether school resources became more unequally distributed across municipalities in connection with the reforms...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to financial incentives and, in particular, it is an attempt to identify the causal impact of a wage loss on the prevalence of corruption in the education sector. Specifically, we exploit the unexpected wage cut in May 2010 that affected all...

The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists’ minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of municipal labour demand in Sweden 1988-1995. Utilising a major grant reform in 1993, through which a switch from mainly targeted to mainly general central government grants occurred, we are able to identify which type of grants that have the...