The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists' minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental strategy to disclose utterly political reasons behind the allocation of intergovernmental transfers in a federal state. We apply a regression discontinuity design in close elections to identify the effect of political alignment on federal transfers to...

The current debt crisis has given rise to a debate about deeper fiscal integration in Europe. The view is widespread that moving towards a 'fiscal union' would have a stabilising effect in the event of macroeconomic shocks. In this paper we study the economic effects of introducing two elements...

This paper examines if money matters in education by looking at whether missing resources due to corruption affect student outcomes. We use data from the auditing of Brazil's local governments to construct objective measures of corruption involving educational block grants transferred from the...

A rigorous understanding of the developmental effect of fiscal transfers to subnational governments remains an important policy research issue globally. This paper exploits a novel dataset of 20 years of municipal poverty maps and local public finances to study the effects on local welfare of a...

The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, we investigate whether politicians use resources from the federal budget as a strategy to maintain and expand their political capital. Second, we examine whether such a strategy is rewarded by voters who elect politicians who assist their...

The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...

We measure the impact of individuals' looks on their life satisfaction or happiness. Using five data sets from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany, we construct beauty measures in different ways that allow putting a lower bound on the true effects of beauty on happiness. Personal beauty...

The intergenerational transmission of employers between fathers and sons is a common feature of labour markets in Canada and Denmark, with 30 to 40% of young adults having at some point been employed with a firm that also employed their fathers. This is strongly associated with the first jobs...

Understanding the causal impacts of taking youth on the margins of risk into foster care is an element of the evidence-base on which policy development for this crucial function of government relies. Yet, there is little research looking at these causal impacts; neither is there much empirical...