This thesis consists of four self-contained papers on job turnover, productivity and state-local finance.<p> Paper [I] deals with the determinants of the rate of job turnover defined as the change in distribution of employment between and within industries in Swedish manufacturing. The rate of...</p>

This paper concerns municipal preferences for state imposed municipal amalgamations. The main purpose of the paper is to study what factors that can explain municipal acceptance or objection of a state imposed amalgamation decision. The empirical analysis is based on the extensive municipal...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the amount of risk sharing of output that takes place between regions in Sweden. Using the approach by Asdrubali et al. (1996), further developed by Mélitz and Zumer (2002), we find that the capital market is the largest source of risk sharing of gross...

This paper concerns optimal taxation and environmental policy in the presence of transboundary environmental damage and labour market distortions, where the latter gives rise to wage bargaining externalities between countries. I consider a decentralized economic federation where the federal...

This paper re-examines the question of whether federal ex-post redistribution in terms of public funds leads to under-provision of public goods by adding the assumption that the member states are free to leave the economic federation. We show that federal ex-post redistribution no longer...

Theoretical models of strategic interaction among local governments are often empirically implemented by the use of spatial econometric techniques. This paper deals with the de…nition of the elements in the spatial weights matrix W in empirical models of strategic interaction among local...

This empirical study takes advantage of a new intergovernmental grant in order to investigate the expenditure behavior of the municipalities in Sweden in two ways. First, the grant is used to study the effect on municipal spending related to the grant. Second, the grant is used to test a...

The thesis consists of an introductory part and three self-contained papers. <p> Paper [I] studies the determinants of the differences in expenditure on services for functionally impaired individuals among municipalities in Sweden. A spatial autoregressive model is used in order to test whether the...</p>

In democracies, elections are the primary mechanism for making politicians act in voters' interests, but voters are unable to prevent that some resources are diverted to political rents. With two levels of government, the rents are reduced if voters require higher beneficial public expenditures...

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two concerns health care and sickness absence, and the last two pharmaceutical costs and prices. <p> Paper [I] presents an economic federation model which resembles the situation in, for example, Sweden. In the model the state governments...</p>