The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However,...

The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However,...

The theoretical literature on the economics of fiscal federalism has identified several potential effects of government decentralization on economic growth. Much of the traditional literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services. However,...

Cooperative federations are usually characterized by the existence of bailout guarantees and intergovernmental transfer schemes. This paper explores whether such features of cooperative federations lead to subnational soft budget constraints using panel data from the German States covering the...

This article explores the effect of sub-national tax autonomy and sub-national control over shared taxes on primary deficits with panel data for 23 OECD countries over the 1975-2000 period. The results suggest that sub-national tax autonomy has a U-shaped effect on primary deficits. We find that...

We study partisan favoritism in the allocation of intergovernmental transfers. Our dataset combines local council election data with fiscal data on grant allocations in the German state of Hesse. Our identification strategy is a regression discontinuity design that relies on a perturbation...