The purpose of this paper is to assess whether expenditure decentralization has contributed to weakening fiscal performance in Europe. Using a panel of EU15 countries for the period 1995-2011, we estimate three econometric models and ask the following questions: (1) does the form of spending...

This paper discusses how decentralized countries can achieve sound fiscal relations between the central government and lower government levels. The concepts of 'vertical gap' and 'vertical balance' provide an analytical framework for identifying and addressing key challenges. These concepts can...

This paper extends the cross sectionally augmented panel unit root test proposed byPesaran (2007) to the case of a multifactor error structure. The basic idea is to exploitinformation regarding the unobserved factors that are shared by other time series in additionto the variable under...

This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the...