The article considers the impact of a major initiative (the National Competition Policy) and pieces of legislation (the Local Government Act and the Local Government Finance Standards) on the internal practices of a large Australian local authority. A theoretical framework is developed using new...

This paper examines the Granger causality between total expenditures, own source revenues, grants received from the State and long-term loans for 12 subgroups of Finnish municipalities. Two panel data sets that cover the years 1985-1992 and 1993-1999 are used in order to compare the effect of...

We analyze the employment gap between Roma and non-Roma men and women in local labor markets to test the hypothesis that ethnic prejudices against a minority have a more substantial labor market impact if the proportion of small firms is high in the local economy. We rely on Hungarian data from...