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...

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 uses cross-national data to examine the effects of different dimensions of decentralization on the efficiency of educational policies in OECD countries. The results show that the autonomy of subnational governments, both on the expenditure and revenue sides of their activities, is...

We analyse the redistributive power of the Spanish central government budget to diminish regional disparities in per capita income in the 1991-1996 period. It firstly makes a brief overview of the most relevant empirical studies carried out on this subject, analysing their methodologies and...

The aim of this study is to estimate the redistributive and stabiliser/insurance effects of the Spanish central government budget at regional level during the 1991-1996 period. This analysis is carried out for the whole budget as well as for the main items of revenue and expenditure. The...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the redistributive effects of the European Union budget between 1995 and 1997 on the countries and regions of the EU. This analysis focuses on the main items of revenue, expenditure and net fiscal balance. The method adopted consists of two stages. First,...

The aim of this study is to estimate the redistributive, stabiliser and insurance effects at territorial level of the federal budget of Australia, Spain, the USA and of the European Union. This analysis is carried out for the budget as a whole through regional fiscal balances and, separately for...

This paper analyzes the impact of political and fiscal decentralization on regional inequalities using a unique data set which covers 56 countries at different stages of economic development. Cross-section and panel data estimations show that decentralization decreases regional inequalities in...

This paper empirically investigates the underlying causes of expenditure decentralization, based on the predictions of a new political economy model of partial fiscal decentralization. Under shared expenditure responsibility, the degree of decentralization is endogenous and depends on the...

Data envelopment analysis and panel data stochastic frontier models are used to evaluate the impact of the 1995 renewal of regional political institutions and the 1998 tax reform (introduction of IRAP) on the efficiency of Italian regional governments. Both methodologies are applied to a...