This article examines effectiveness of sub-national borrowing control regimes in maintaining overall fiscal sustainability. The results suggest that regulating sub-national borrowing based on fiscal rules performs most efficiently in maintaining fiscal consolidation. Furthermore, sole reliance...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we analyse financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on two...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...

The main objective of this research consists on analyzing regional public sector enterprises (PSEs) in Spain. We describe a general view on Spanish Autonomous Communities (ACs) financial resources, in the context of the Stability and Growth Pact and Budgetary Stability Act. From 2002, such...

This paper is an empirical study of redistributive preferences. Our interest is what motivates net contributors to support redistributive policies. Using instrumental variable estimation and exploiting a particularity of the Spanish labour market we estimate how workers’ declared preferences...

The literature on horizontal tax interdependence pays limited attention to interactions in administrative policies, although they can play a large role in determining the amount of tax revenues collected. We investigate the incentives for sub-central tax authority cooperation in a decentralized...

One of the fundamental tenets of fiscal federalism is that, absent various sorts of externalities, decentralized governments that rely on own-source revenues should be more fiscally efficient than decentralized governments that rely on grant financing. The argument relies in part on the idea...

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighbouring...

This paper offers an evaluation about the current design of the unconditional transfer system to the municipalities in Spain taking as a reference the precepts of fiscal federalism theory. The analysis carried out is based on the released results of the model during the period from 2004-2009, in...

In this paper, we look at corporate fiscal policies set by two competing regions in an environment where firms are heterogonous regarding to their mobility costs. We show that if regions are allow to tax domestic and foreign capital at different rates, they will offer a preferential treatment to...