We study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co‐partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about their chances of re‐election. To do so, we draw on data detailing capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to local...

We study whether incumbents facing uncontested elections channel public spending towards co‐partisan officials more than is the case of incumbents that are worried about their chances of re‐election. To do so, we draw on data detailing capital transfers allocated by Spanish regions to local...

We investigate whether corruption amplifies the political effects of economic crises. Using Spanish municipal-level data and a difference-in-difference strategy, we find that local unemployment shocks experienced during the Great Recession (2008-2015) increased political fragmentation. This...

We examine whether state-level incumbents discriminate in the allocation of transfers in favour of local governments controlled by co-partisans, and whether the electoral prospects of local incumbents improve when they are aligned with the state incumbent. Using a new database covering around...

We examine whether a corruption scandal in which the incumbent is implicated undermines trust in local government. We use a novel dataset containing information on local corruption scandals reported in Spain during the period 1999-2009, and data on the level of trust expressed in local...

We examine whether a corruption scandal in which the incumbent is implicated undermines trust in local government. We use a novel dataset containing information on local corruption scandals reported in Spain during the period 1999-2009, and data on the level of trust expressed in local...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants allocated to co-partisans buy more political support than grants allocated to local governments controlled by opposition parties. We use a rich Spanish database containing information about the grants received by 617...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that municipalities aligned with upper-tier grantor governments (i.e., controlled by the same party) will receive more grants than those that are unaligned. We use a rich Spanish database, which provides information on grants received by nearly 900...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether Spanish municipalities adjust in response to budget shocks and (if so) which elements of the budget they are more likely to adjust. The methodology we use to answer these questions is a vector error-correction model (VECM), estimated with data from a...

We examine whether state-level incumbents discriminate in the allocation of transfers in favour of local governments controlled by co-partisans, and whether the electoral prospects of local incumbents improve when they are aligned with the state incumbent. Using a new database covering around...