We investigate the effect on municipality spending efficiency of a local property tax reform, which reduced in 2008 the upper limit of the property tax. We compute municipality efficiency scores via data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) from 2005 to 2011, and then we rely in a panel data set to...

We study the fiscal and tax response to intergovernmental grants, exploiting quasi-experimental variation within Germany’s fiscal equalization scheme triggered by Census revisions of official population counts. Municipal budgets do not adjust instantly. Instead, spending and investments adapt...

Redistributive grants schemes, such as fiscal equalization, are a common characteristic of local public finance in several countries. However, large and small jurisdictions are treated differently by the respective fiscal equalization schemes that often tend to favour larger jurisdictions. This...

Intergovernmental transfers can be either conditional or unconditional with regard to the autonomy of local governments in spending such financial means. Although fiscal decentralisation has recently been quite pronounced in Eastern European transition countries, the dominance of a purpose- and...

The transfer elasticity of income tax rates is an important parameter in public finance. Given the significant fiscal autonomy of Swiss municipalities, Switzerland is an ideal setting for examining behavioral responses to tax policy. Using a regression kink design, we find robust causal evidence...

In this paper, we study whether local spending of intergovernmental grants is influenced by mayoral elections in the grant receiving municipality. We exploit the implementation of the German federal government’s second economic stimulus package of 2009 (K2) in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg...

We exploit the introduction of an open data online platform - part of a transparency program initiated by the Italian Government in late 2014 - as a natural experiment to analyse the effect of data disclosure on mayors' expenditure and public good provision. First, we analyse the effect of the...

This paper investigates the political economy of after merger effects of the large scale municipal amalgamations in the German state of Baden-Württemberg in the early 1970s. By exploiting the huge variance in the amalgamation process in terms of number of participating municipalities,...

Municipal break-ups are an understudied phenomenon despite the fact that such territorial reforms regularly take place across the globe. This paper estimates how seven voluntary splits of Swedish municipalities affected municipal current costs. To predict what would have happened had the...