This paper exploits the unique institutional features of South Africa to estimate the impact of provincial public spending on health, education and transport on firm productivity. Our identification strategy is based on within industry-province differences between firms of the effects of public...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...