This paper studies how changes in welfare policy affect welfare recipients' residential choices. Although several empirical studies have stressed that welfare policy may affect residential choices of welfare recipients, few studies have simultaneously taken into account that residential choices...

Most theories of voter behavior predict that electoral participation will be higher in elections where more is at stake. We test this prediction by studying how participation is affected by exogenous variation in local governments' financial flexibility to provide pork for their voters....

When investigating the effects of federal grants on the behavior of lower-level governments, it is hard to defend the handling of grants as an exogenous factor. Federal governments often set grants based on characteristics and performance of decentralized governments. In this paper we make use...