Do gender differences matter for politicians' budgetary behaviour when confronted with an exogenous change in the institutional framework? After the 2013 Spanish municipal reform, municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants were no longer responsible for managing the provision of social...

This paper empirically evaluates the impact of accountability on fiscal capacity. It adopts an instrumental variable approach using, as an instrument, the measurement of how far, on average, official language differs from ordinary language. The main hypothesis is that if the average citizen...

This study deals with a specific volunteering aspect revealed in the German refugee crisis 2015/16. German federalism prescribing interjurisdictional assignments of tasks for designing, financing and implementing services for refugees and their geographic distribution have made municipalities...

We analyse the revenue-expenditure patterns of local governments, allowing for asymmetric and non-linear adjustments of local spending and taxation to disequilibrium errors. Our results provide evidence of a downward inflexibility of both local government spending and local taxation, pointing to...

Previous studies on electoral competition show that fiscal variables are manipulated by incumbent politicians in order to be re-elected. This phenomenon has been addressed by the literature on electoral budget cycle and, in a decentralised economy, by the literature on yardstick competition. Our...

Interjurisdictional flows of imperfectly-mobile migrants, investment, and other productive resources result in the costly dynamic adjustment of resource stocks. This paper investigates the comparative dynamics of adjustment to changes in local fiscal policy with two imperfectly mobile productive...

We explore how the vertical structure of direct democracy in a federal context affects expenditure decisions of sub-central governments. In so doing we revisit previous research on the effect of direct democratic institution on public policies. Particularly, the effect of upper-level (state)...

In this paper we argue that different preferences in a decentralized system lead to under provision of public goods. We analyze the provision of public primary education in nineteenth-century Prussia which was characterized by a linguistically polarized society and a decentralized education...