This paper provides new evidence for the empirical literature that investigates the presence of political cycles in fiscal policy and, more precisely, public investments in Brazil. The approach differs from most of the studies for applying the state-space modeling. The greatest benefit is to...

This article demonstrates that the influence of government ideology on military expenditures is more nuanced than it was shown in previous research and using only aggregated military expenditures may provide ambiguous results. The disaggregation of military expenditures allows concluding that in...

We study the link between geographic political representation and geographic distribution of public goods within local jurisdictions using geo-coded data on politicians, the electorate and elementary school closures. We find that poorer neighborhoods are under-represented. Inequality in...

We study the allocation of German lawyers to regional courts for legal trainee-ships. Because of excess demand in some regions lawyers often have to wait before being allocated. The currently used "Berlin" mechanism is not weakly Pareto efficient, does not eliminate justified envy and does not...

The gap in university enrollment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey, 74 percent of German university graduates, but only 36 percent of those without a university degree favor a university education for their children. The latter are more...

We suggest an alternative indicator that can lead to price reductions in the public procurement market for goods, i.e., the elasticity of prices to quantities purchased. We apply the analysis to the procurement of medical devices by exploiting a survey from the Italian AntiCorruption Authority....

How do patient and provider incentives affect the provision of long-term care? Our analysis of 551 thousand nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

Increases in youth vaping rates and concerns of a new generation of nicotine addicts recently prompted an increase in the federal minimum legal purchase age (MLPA) for tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, to 21 years. This study presents the first regression discontinuity evidence on the...

This paper aims to investigate the relation between inefficiency in the Brazilian education system and municipal wealth, discussing how the actual legislation possibly influences it. To that end, we apply a stochastic frontier model which accommodates covariates in the asymmetric error component...