Political economy literature considers fiscal federalism as a mechanism to refrain the growth of government. However, an unbalanced federalism may induce government growth. This paper studies the Brazilian case, in which the municipalities are beneficiaries of a common pool of federal and state...

The present work aims to explore the existing theories about the size of the public sector and test empirically in Brazilian municipalities. The theoretical model assumes that the economy has only two sectors: the public and the private. The latter receives productivity shocks while the former...

The present work aims to explore the existing theories about the size of the public sector and test empirically in Brazilian municipalities. The theoretical model assumes that the economy has only two sectors: the public and the private. The latter receives productivity shocks while the former...

This paper analyses the effects of two recent institutional changes, the "Reelection Amendment" and the Law of Fiscal Responsibility, on political budget cycles and fiscal performance of Brazilian federal states. The empirical evidence shows that (1) contrarily to previous results, the...

This paper analyses the fiscal performance of São Paulo state municipalities, between the years of 1989 and 2001, considering the influence of two political factors: the electoral agenda and the different political party ideologies. Based on panel data econometric methods, specific components...

By considering the São Paulo state municipalities, the present study develops an econometric model – panel logit – to analyze the political and fiscal determinants of budgetary surpluses / budgetary deficits during the 1989 – 2001 period. According to the obtained results, the fiscal...

The article analyzes the spatial pattern of public spending in several federative and regional scales. Theoretical considerations show gaps and common concepts to the relationship between federalism and territory. The empirical analysis shows an asymmetric pattern, with small and large...

There are many problems involved in estimating high frequency series for subnational governments. Space State Model (SSM) is a framework capable of handling some of these problems. The techniques that emerge from this approach (temporal disaggregation and nowcasting) are used to estimate monthly...

This paper attempts to discuss quality and some improvements in high frequency time series data of the nominal gross investment expenses for Brazilian municipalities which are state capitals. We first utilized data for the 2001-2008 period available in Relatórios Resumidos de Execução...

The paper estimates a panel-VAR using data on total expenditures, tax receipts and overall grants received for 5.544 Brazilian municipalities observed from 2002 through 2010. A sequence of hypotheses was investigated by the means of overidentification test statistics. Among our main findings, we...