This paper is intended to provide an assessment of the impact of the silent revolution (decentralization reforms) of the last three decades on moving governments closer to people to establish fair, accountable, incorruptible and responsive governance. To accomplish this, a unique data set is...

Elected representatives have little incentive to pursue the interests of those electing them once they are elected. This well-known principle-agent problem leads, in a variety of theories of government, to nonoptimally large levels of government expenditure. An implication is that budgetary...

This paper deals with the influence of factor mobility on local infrastructure policy and rent-seeking activities of local interest groups. It employs a model where households differ with respect to their endowment with the immobile factor land. Local governments decide about the level of...

This paper takes stock of German public support measures in favour of families. The database comprises benefits from family-specific norms of tax law as well as cash and in-kind transfers both from public budgets (federal, states’ and local layer) and from the social insurance system...

The paper deals with the issue in how far the fiscal policy of the German Laender can be considered as sustainable. Comparing the fiscal policy stance and budgets of the 16 German states, only Bavaria and Saxony are pursuing a fiscal policy which may be labelled as sustainable. The other states...

The economic effects of offshoring have been subject to extensive empirical analysis in the past, but many studies have not accurately distinguished between offshoring, domestic outsourcing, and the substitution of domestic by foreign suppliers. In this study I provide stylized facts on...

Learning-by-exporting proponents argue that exporting increases productivity by exposing producers to new technologies or through product quality upgrading. This study is based on the observation that the technological superiority and severity of product quality requirements are not the same in...

This paper provides a different perspective on the firm-level empirical analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and capital demand adjustment in host countries. The author estimates a dynamic structural model of investment on a sample of 4672 Belgian firms observed between 2003 and...

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity (TFP) for Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2008, both under the assumption of an exogenous or an endogenous law of motion for productivity. The authors first obtain TFP estimates under each alternative...

This paper argues that the production constraints in the basic NAIRU model should be distinguished by type: capital constraints and labour constraints. It notes the failure to incorporate this phenomenon in standard macro models. Using panel data for UK manufacturing over eighty quarters it is...