We evaluate the effect of relaxing fiscal rules on policy outcomes applying a quasi-experimental research design. In 1999, the Italian central government introduced fiscal rules aimed at imposing fiscal discipline on municipal governments, and in 2001 the rules were relaxed for municipalities...

Principal-agent problems can arise when preferences of voters are not aligned with preferences of political representatives. Often the consequence of the political principal-agent problem is political catering to special interests. In this paper I provide examples of principal-agent problems...

We apply the difference-in-discontinuities design to disentangle the fiscal effects of the governance system conditional on electoral systems. We take advantage of a natural experiment, which involves two institutional reforms at the local level in Poland. The first reform introduced two...

This paper provides a method for the analysis of the spatial and temporal diffusion of shocks in a dynamic system. We use changes in real house prices within the UK economy at the level of regions to illustrate its use. Adjustment to shocks involves both a region specific and a spatial effect....

This article investigates the patronage phenomenon in the italian, so called, Second Republic. In particular, the analysis argues that (ex) members of parliament are appointed to managerial boards in italian (partially) state-owned enterprises responding to political selection rationales....

The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology which can be used to set X-factor under price cap schemes, when the number of observations is limited. We firstly apply a panel index approach across Water and Sewerage companies (WaSCs) over time to decompose unit-specific index number based...