In this paper we investigate the determinants of municipal labour demand in Sweden 1988-1995. Utilising a major grant reform in 1993, through which a switch from mainly targeted to mainly general central government grants occurred, we are able to identify which type of grants that have the...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of municipal labour demand in Sweden 1988-1995. Utilising a major grant reform in 1993, through which a switch from mainly targeted to mainly general central government grants occurred, we are able to identify which type of grants that have the...

Two different bootstrap approaches for GMM estimation have recently been suggested for use in dynamic panel data models (Brown & Newey (1995) and Hall & Horowitz (1996)) In this paper we compare the small sample properties of these estimators, suggest how sequential testing can be conducted...

In this paper we use mixed logit specifications to allow parameters to vary in the population when estimating the value of time for long-distance car travel. Our main conclusion is that the estimated value of time is very sensitive to how the model is specified: we find that it is significantly...

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between local government revenues and expenditures in Sweden. Results from a panel of 265 municipalities covered over the time period 1974-87 show that (i) expenditures cause revenues, while revenues do not cause expenditures, (ii) intergovernmental...

This paper investigates the power properties of the Sargan test in the presence of measurement errors in dynamic panel data models. The general conclusion from the Monte Carlo simulations is that the Sargan test, in many cases, leads the econometrician to accept misspecified models with...

Even though recent Monte Carlo evidence has shown that the use of bootstrap critical values, instead of asymptotic ones, improves the size of the tests substantially, empirical applications using GMM bootstrap techniques are largely missing. In this paper, the dynamic relationship between local...

A couple of months before the Swedish election in 1998, the incumbent government distributed 2.3 billion SEK to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities. This was the first wave of a four-year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable...

Recent Monte Carlo evidence has shown that tests based on asymptotic critical values tend to reject a true null too often, while tests based on bootstrap critical values have empirical sizes that are very close to the nominal ones. This casts doubt on the growing number of studies indicating...

Do governments increase public employment in election years? This article answers this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two countries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. These facts make it possible for us to...