Motivated by recent interest and initiatives taken by several governments and international organizations to come up with indicators of well-being to inform policy makers, we test if subjective well-being measures (SWB) can be employed to study voting behaviour. Controlling for financial and...

This paper analyses whether the different powers and resources at the disposal of local and regional governments across Europe deliver greater satisfaction with political institutions and lead to greater personal happiness. The analysis uses microdata from the four available waves of the...

The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22...

Public employment grew surprisingly fast in Russia during the 1990s, at a time when total employment was falling. Most of this growth occurred in the country’s 89 regions, and rates varied among them. This paper seeks to explain this variation. Using panel data for 78 regions over 1992-1998 we...

We address the impact of corruption in a developing economy in the context of an empirically relevant hold-up problem - when a foreign firm sinks an investment to provide infrastructure services. We focus on the structure of the economy’s bureaucracy, which can be centralized or decentralized,...

Environmental federalism refers to the debate over the 'optimal' level of government at which to delegate environmental policymaking. Although this issue receives widespread attention across the globe, opinions run the gamut. The diversity of views plays out in practice as well as different...

The view is widespread that there are just two options for the future of the Eurozone – either it is complemented by a fiscal union, or it will fall apart. In this paper, we discuss five possible elements of a fiscal union, of which three are in the centre of the current debate on fiscal union...

This paper gives a short synoptical overview of the most important elements of current anti-immigration policy in Germany. Based on the hypothesis that its primary aim is exclusion of new migrants, the measures taken within the framework of a groupwise nationally oriented but internationally...

Policy towards asylum seekers has been a controversial topic for more than a decade. Rising numbers of asylum applications have been met with ever-tougher policies to deter them. Following a period of policy harmonisation, the EU has reached a crucial stage in the development of a new Common...

This paper investigates one of the most important financial issues arising from a secession or a country partitioning namely the sharing of the national public debt. Extending Drèze's distributive neutrality condition, we use the generational accounting technique and propose a dynamic...