Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

Determining what influences mood is important for theories of emotion and research on subjective well-being. We consider three sets of factors: activities in which people are engaged; individual differences; and incidental variables that capture when mood is measured, e.g., time-of-day. These...

In this paper we analyse the observed systematic differences in costs for teaching hospitals (THhenceforth) in Spain. Concern has been voiced regarding the existence of a bias in the financing of TH’s has been raised once prospective budgets are in the arena for hospital finance, and claims...

In this paper we analyse the observed systematic differences in costs for teaching hospitals (THhenceforth) in Spain. Concern has been voiced regarding the existence of a bias in the financing of TH’s has been raised once prospective budgets are in the arena for hospital finance, and claims...

The context where the university admissions exams are performed is presented and the main concerns about this exams are outlined and discussed from a statistical point of view. The paper offers an illustration of the use of random coefficient models in the study of educational data. The...

The organisation of inpatient care provision has undergone significant reform in many southern European countries. Overall across Europe, public management is moving towards the introduction of more flexibility and autonomy . In this setting, the promotion of the further decentralisation of...

A notable difference between the U.S. and many countries in Europe is in the degree of fiscal decentralization. Regional (and local) governments in the U.S. have significant autonomy in setting their own taxes and determining how to spend their revenues. This is not true of their counterparts in...

The classic theory of fiscal federalism suggests that different people should have different governments. Yet, separate local governments with homogeneous constituents often end up doing poorly. This paper explains why and answers three questions: when regions are heterogeneous, what determines...

We explore the implications for the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization when people’s preferences for goods and services, which classic treatments of fiscal federalism (Oates, 1972) place in the purview of local governments, exhibit specific egalitarianism (Tobin, 1970), or solidarity....

From the perspective of redistributing income from rich to poor, equalizing intergovernmental grants are bound to have some perverse effects. For such grants, although transfering income from wealthy to poor on average, will inevitably result in some income transfers from poor individuals who...