Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

In an interesting and influential paper Robert Lucas (1993) considering the experience of East Asian small economies, suggests that on the job" learning could be the principal engine of their miraculous growth in the last 20 years. In this paper I develop an overlapping generation model where on...

This paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends, by lessening local information spill-overs, to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto-correlation among local government...

The fluctuations in incomes inherent in rural communities can be attenuated by reciprocal insurance. We develop a model of such insurance based on self-interested behaviour and voluntary participation. One individual assists another only if the costs of so doing are outweighed by the benefits...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful "codecision makers", understanding of the final stage of the procedure...

The analogy between the economic problems of the Mezzogiorno region and East Germany has been initially contested by many authors. This paper argues that there are striking similiarities in the two regions, in terms of the causes of their economic predicament. With an aggregate labour...

To explain cross-country income differences, research has recently focused on the so-called deep determinants of economic development, notably institutions and geography. This paper sheds a different light on these determinants. We use spatial econometrics to analyse the importance of the...

The paper sets up a two-region endogenous growth model to discuss growth and regional convergence of unified Germany. It emphasises the role of private and public capital accumulation during the developing process. The theoretical part derives fiscal policy rules which establish convergence of...

Considerable concern has been expressed in resent years about declines in voter participartion rates in the United States and in several other major democratic countries. Some feel low participation rates intropuce a "class bias" into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from...

Rational politicians are interested in judicial independence (JI) in order to make their promises credible. But if politicians' preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. These two conflicting aspects are measured by two...