Budgetary consolidations are considered the obvious explanation for the decline in public investment that most Western European countries experienced over the past three decades. However, regressions based on budgetary variables tend to overpredict public investment during the post-1990 period,...

The OECD produces two-year-ahead growth forecasts for the G7-countries since 1987; these forecasts have never been evaluated. A regression is developed that tests for the information content of the forecasts. The idea is that this content is the added value forecasters incorporate in their...

Competition reduces rent extraction in private-sector firms. In this article, we empirically assess whether it similarly disciplines politicians by evaluating local-level governments' performance in Flanders. The results indicate that <italic>electoral</italic> competition -- measured via the number of parties...

Recent empirical work on US governments indicates an asymmetry in the flypaper effect: the elasticity of public spending with respect to changes in grants differs significantly for positive and negative changes. Using a panel of data on Flemish municipalities covering the period 1989-1996, we...

We analyse programmatic choices of Flemish theatres and examine how they are affected by the theatres' budgetary situation. Following Lancaster's characteristics approach, we identify several output characteristics of individual Flemish theatres during the period 1980 to 2000. A simultaneous...

Recent theoretical papers develop political agency models in which voters compare tax policy with that in neighbouring jurisdictions. In these yardstick competition models voters judge incumbents by comparing their policy with policy in neighbouring jurisdictions. This paper reports an analysis...