We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

This study investigates whether net inbound migration and per capita income growth of a municipality is affected when a local sports team enters or exits the premium national leagues in ice hockey or soccer in Sweden. Local governments frequently support a local professional team through direct...

In this paper, we examine the role of spillovers in economic growth for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region by accounting for spatial effects. Such spatial effects in growth for the MENA countries may arise on the basis of geography, bilateral trade or institutional similarities. We...

Commuting shapes countless everyday-lives around the world, with dynamics varying from city to regional and cross regional level. Taking as reference the free-movement EU-28 area (plus Switzerland and Norway), the analysis considers a total sample of 195 NUTS2 regions over the decade 2007-2017...

Even though Bangladesh has made progress towards reaching some of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is still a major challenge for the government to further reduce poverty and improve human developments, in particular achieving a 100 percent primary-school completion rate. As foreign...

Recent studies have found that resource-rich low-income countries are better off investing their resource revenues domestically rather than saving them abroad in a sovereign wealth fund (SWF). This paper finds an optimal rule-based policy of accumulating public capital and its associated public...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional performance calculated using data on the provision of different areas of public services. In order to address...

We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a...

In this paper we study the dynamics of local employment growth in West Germany from 1980 to 2001. Using dynamic panel techniques, we analyse the timing of the impact of diversity and specialisation, as well as of the human capital structure of local industries. Diversity has a positive effect on...