The links between subnational political budget cycles (PBCs) and the national government in federal countries have seldom been studied. We study the behavior of the budget balance, public expenditures, and revenues in Argentine provinces during the 1985-2001 period. We find that in election...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of all...

We provide an empirical study analysing the distribution of EU funds among 2478 Polish municipalities in the period of the multiannual financial framework 2007 - 2013. We find EU funds to be concentrated in smaller municipalities and economically weak sub-regions. Expenditures of EU funds per...

Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local...

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork-barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives...

We study the allocation of investment projects by municipal governments across groups of voters using data from a fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain between 2009 and 2011. This program provided municipalities with a large endowment to spend in public investments and required the...

Geographic representation is an important consideration in candidate nominations, even under closed-list proportional representation (PR), and may even matter for distributive policy outcomes. However, since nominations are determined strategically, the causal effects of local representation are...

Diermeier and Fong (2008a) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and...

Many governments operate consumer debt relief programs, often timed to match the election cycle, but their political effects are not well understood. We ask if debt relief can influence elections in democracies. Our motivating exercise is the Biden administration's promise to relieve student...