The well-known "Decentralization Theorem" (Oates, 1972) establishes the superiority of decentralized public provision over the centralized case, which is not so sensitive to the diversity of expenditure needs among territories. We test this hypothesis using a unique Spanish database that...

En este trabajo se cuantifica la importancia relativa de las necesidades de gasto y de la capacidad fiscal como factores explicativos de la desigualdad observada en los niveles de gasto p£blico local por habitante con datos de los municipios de la provincia de Barcelona con m s de 5.000...

This paper analyse the costs and benefits of being a capital or central municipality, where central costs are understood to be incurred specifically as a result of the problems large municipalities located at the centre of an urban agglomeration face and capital costs are understood to result...

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...

Most of the Structural Actions are designed as an incentive to increase public investment in less-developed areas. However, we suspect that the efficiency of the policy is related to the level of fiscal autonomy of the subsidized government. In this paper we construct a paned data model in order...

This paper considers a simple dynamic decentralized leadership model with local borrowing and regional productivity enhancing investment. The central government is benevolent but cannot commit. The local governments strategically act while accounting for the ex post motive of the central...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether Spanish municipalities adjust in response to budget shocks and (if so) which elements of the budget they are more likely to adjust. The methodology we use to answer these questions is a vector error-correction model (VECM), estimated with data from a...

This paper examines the impact of urban sprawl, a phenomenon of particular interest in Spain, which is currently experiencing this process of rapid, low-density urban expansion. Many adverse consequences are attributed to urban sprawl (e.g., traffic congestion, air pollution and social...

The paper presents a model for measuring spillovers resulting from local expenditure policies. We identify and test for three different types of budget spillovers: (i) benefit spillovers, derived from the production of local public goods, (ii) externalities in crowding, derived from the crowding...

We identify exogenous variation in incumbent policymakers’ re-election probabilities and explore empirically how this variation affects their investments in physical capital. Our results indicate that a higher re-election probability leads to higher investments, particularly in the purposes...