Private and collective enterprises are expected to increase overall efficiency in transitional China, partly because they are more efficient than state owned enterprises. More importantly, this paper argues, they induce efficiency gains in state owned enterprises and the economy as a whole....

The number of private enterprises in China has grown rapidly, and donations from them are an important source of philanthropy in China today. This paper investigates donations given in 2011 by private enterprises using a survey of data covering all 31 provincial-level units of China. The data...

This paper examines whether revenue decentralization and direct external financial supervision affect the incidence and strength of political budget cycles, using a panel of Israeli municipalities during the period 1999-2009. We find that high dependence on central government transfers - as...

The application of the rational choice postulate to a political context invariably leads to the conclusion that most voters are ill informed when making the decision for whom to vote. In this paper, the authors do an empirical evaluation of the rational ignorance theory, based on the results of...

The political article tests for rational political business cycles models on an unexplored and large data set of Portuguese municipalities. This data allows for a clean test of the models due to its high level of detail on expenditure items, an exogenous fixed election schedule and the...

The quest for political support drives to upward deviations from forecasted public deficits when i) budget procedures are soft, ii) breaking promises involving higher expenditures and lower taxes is costly in political terms, and iii) ex–post control by voters and political opposition is...

Whenever a central government faces a sub-unit in financial distress, the unpleasant question arises of whether to assist the unit or not. On the one hand, resisting to bail out the unit may lead to default or bankruptcy, which could be very costly both economically and politically. On the other...

Local road investments work for growth and poverty reduction in local areas. The paper highlights the importance of investing in local roads and directs attention to the critical role of local government units (LGUs) in improving the local road network. Raising additional monies to fund local...

This paper first formulates a model of how the politicians in a local government collectively lobby to raise intergovernmental grants to their local government. The model identifies a relationship between council size and grants received. I then study this relationship empirically using the...

This paper investigates the effect of political representation on the electoral outcome at the party level in a proportional multiparty election system using data from Swedish local government elections. There are two notions of representation in a council; the first is to hold seats, and the...