We measure the contribution of fiscal decentralization to trust in government. Using repeated cross-country survey data of individuals on several measures of trust in government over the 1994{2007 period, we estimate an ordered response model of the government trust and fiscal decentralization...

This paper demonstrates the effects of ethnic diversity on social relationships and the quality of public spaces at a very finite neighborhood level. We use detailed block level data on diversity and housing quality from a representative survey on housing in France. We show how and to what...

This paper analyzes the impact of ideology on the size of US state governments. Following Pickering and Rockey (2011) this impact is hypothesized to increase with mean state income. This idea is tested using state-level ideology data derived from the voting behavior of state congressional...

In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so far: independent auditing institutions with an extended mandate to analyze the budget draft and individual policy proposals. We...

Literature has long learned about the welfare improving effect of equalization in tax competition environments. By setting incentives to local authorities, public spending becomes efficient in spite of relying on a mobile resource as the tax base. This paper proves that this result cannot hold...

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 Europe there are countries whose welfare system is more in the tradition of Beveridge (based on universal flat benefits) and others whose system is mainly Bismarkian (based on benefits related to past contributions).Labor mobility across different countries raises concerns about the...

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...

Crime risk perception is known to be an important determinant of individual well-being. It is therefore crucial that we understand the factors affecting this perception so that governments can identify the (public) policies that might reduce it. Among such policies, public resources devoted to...

The growth in the number of tourist arrivals in Spain in recent years has had significant economic repercussions; yet, little has been reported about its negative impact. This study goes some way to rectifying this by estimating the impact of tourist activity on crime rates in the Spanish...