This paper extends the empirical literature about the effects of fiscal decentralization on the growth of government along three dimensions. It distinguishes between the effects of the level of decentralization from the way local governments finance their expenditures (common pool versus own...

This paper focuses on the issue of the electoral and ideological cycles in state government budget for the eleven Western German Lander. We verify this hypothesis over the period 1974-1994 for the following budgetary variables: total expenditures, surplus/deficit, administration, health care,...

The paper assesses the relative explanatory power of the Keynesian, the optimal finance, the contingent liability and several public choice theories of the determinants of public deficits on Italian 1950-1998 data. A vector error correction model suggests that deficits are sensitive to...