I study whether bailouts of local governments carry electoral benefits for state governments with a dataset covering 421 municipalities in the German state of Hesse over the period 1999-2011. I find that past bailouts have no economically significant effect on the municipality-level vote share...

Theory suggests that transfers should have an effect on local fiscal policy that is similar to an equivalent increase in local incomes. Yet much of the empirical literature shows that local governments use transfers primarily to increase expenditures. Recent contributions have revisited this so...

Amadora and Diadema are two small-sized but densely populated suburban municipalities, territorially contiguous to the metropolises of Lisbon (PT) and São Paulo (BR). In spite of their geographic and socio-economic specificities they both present common and important social exclusion (e.g....

This study examines the debts of the municipalities of the Mexican state of Jalisco from an institutional and economic perspective. We find that fiscal institutions and institutional processes are often incomplete and inadequate. We also find that: 1) The municipalities that borrow the most are...

In the present work we argue that in order to appraise the explanatory power of the existing explanations of dualism in the Italian economy it is important to examine their empirical predictions relatively to the territorial dispersion of some efficiency measures. Applying the non-parametric FDH...

The present contribution focuses on two issues. The first one concerns the characteristics of industrial districts and the increasing weight of these districts in the Italian system of production. The second issue is about the competitiveness of the Italian industrial districts, if they...