Based on a theoretical model where state limits on local government policy elicit a move from private value (position issue) to common value (valence issue) voting, I exploit exogenous variation in tax limitation rules in over 7,000 Italian municipalities during the 2000s to show that fiscal...

We study the impact of exogenous variation in Italian municipal elections' voter turnout rates on city performance scores and elected mayors'indicators of valence. First, we build a simple model of voluntary and costly expressive voting, where the relative weight of ideology and valence issues...

This paper models the local tax mix determination process in the presence of state-wide tax limitations and shows how excess sensitivity of local public spending to grants (the conventionally and somewhat misleadingly called flypaper effect) arises in the endogenously generated constrained tax...