Most opportunistic-type models of political business cycles tend to posit a given objective for incumbents: maximisation of re-election chances. Though taking an opportunistic view too, we suggest a new explanation for a fiscal policy cycle: the incumbent’s concern with her own welfare in...

In this work we use a VAR/ECM approach to determine the effects of aggregated public investment on output, employment and private investment for five EU countries. Based on impulse-response functions associated to the estimated VAR, we obtain long-term accumulated elasticities, long-term...

In this paper we gather empirical evidence on the existence of strategic interaction among Portuguese municipal executives when they set rates of property tax and in particular if we are in the presence of yardstick competition. For that purpose, we adopted the assumption of geographic...

Sorting and heterogeneity of households at metropolitan level has been a subject of many empirical studies. Interest in the subject goes beyond the knowledge of household mobility because it also has importance for the debate on the Tiebout’s hypothesis that households “vote with the feet”...

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...

Fiscal decentralisation is a hot issue worldwide. Within the European Union, there are even opposing tendencies with respect to the assignment of responsibilities between government tiers. This is a textbook paper aiming to provide a pedagogic introduction to the economics of government...

O desafio colocado pelos organizadores não podia deixar de ser respondido afirmativamente, tanto por causa do autor da apresentação como pela relevância social e a oportunidade do tema. Com Orlando Caliço apreendi, na fase inicial da minha carreira, a utilidade de pôr as mãos na...