This paper uses cross-national data to examine the effects of different dimensions of decentralization on the efficiency of educational policies in OECD countries. The results show that the autonomy of subnational governments, both on the expenditure and revenue sides of their activities, is...

While electoral accountability should be stronger when responsibilities are clearly assigned to one political office, the involvement of higher tiers of government is often associated with policies specifically designed to improve local accountability. This paper investigates the impact of...

This paper aims at assessing the impact on citizens’ well-being of fiscal discipline imposed by Central Government to sub-national governments. Since health care policies involve strategic interactions between different layers of governments in many different countries, we focus on a...

A `dress-up contest' is a competition for the best public image, and fiscal decentralisation can lead to such contests between local governments. In this paper we model the dress-up contest and investigate how it a effects social welfare. We show that yardstick competition (due to fiscal...

The objective of the paper is to study the disciplining role of both market forces and regional governments own resources in the provision of educational services. The historical evolution of school regulation in Italy and Spain (in particular regarding the funding of private schools run by...

This paper is an empirical study of redistributive preferences. Our interest is what motivates net contributors to support redistributive policies. Using instrumental variable estimation and exploiting a particularity of the Spanish labour market we estimate how workers’ declared preferences...

The literature on horizontal tax interdependence pays limited attention to interactions in administrative policies, although they can play a large role in determining the amount of tax revenues collected. We investigate the incentives for sub-central tax authority cooperation in a decentralized...

One of the fundamental tenets of fiscal federalism is that, absent various sorts of externalities, decentralized governments that rely on own-source revenues should be more fiscally efficient than decentralized governments that rely on grant financing. The argument relies in part on the idea...

This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighbouring...

This paper offers an evaluation about the current design of the unconditional transfer system to the municipalities in Spain taking as a reference the precepts of fiscal federalism theory. The analysis carried out is based on the released results of the model during the period from 2004-2009, in...