This paper analyse the costs and benefits of being a capital or central municipality, where central costs are understood to be incurred specifically as a result of the problems large municipalities located at the centre of an urban agglomeration face and capital costs are understood to result...

We test the "yardstick competition" hypothesis by looking at the effects of property tax increases both in the locality and in other comparable jurisdictions on the incumbents' vote. In order to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of taxes on voting, we account for national political...

We analyse the redistributive power of the Spanish central government budget to diminish regional disparities in per capita income in the 1991-1996 period. It firstly makes a brief overview of the most relevant empirical studies carried out on this subject, analysing their methodologies and...

The aim of this study is to estimate the redistributive and stabiliser/insurance effects of the Spanish central government budget at regional level during the 1991-1996 period. This analysis is carried out for the whole budget as well as for the main items of revenue and expenditure. The...

The aim of this article is to analyse the technical efficiency and cost-efficiency of the refuse collection services in 73 municipalities located in Catalonia, Spain. The analysis has been carried out using a modification of the DEA model in three stages developed by Fried and Lovell (1996),...