In the past three decades, emerging countries have gone through extensive decentralization reforms. Yet, there are no studies assessing quantitatively the relative importance of various factors known to affect the success of decentralization. This paper builds on a comprehensive dataset the...

In a monetary union, the interaction between several governments and a single central bank is plagued by several sources of deficit bias, including common pool problems. Each government has strong preferences over local spending and taxation but suffers only part of the costs of union-wide...

In a monetary union, the interaction between several governments and a single central bank is plagued by several sources of deficit bias, including common pool problems. Each government has strong preferences over local spending and taxation but suffers only part of the costs of union-wide...

In a monetary union, the interaction between several governments and a single central bank is plagued by several sources of deficit bias, including common pool problems. Each government has strong preferences over local spending and taxation but suffers only part of the costs of union-wide...

This paper studies the effects of delegating control of sovereign debt issuance to an independent authority in a monetary union where public spending decisions are decentralized. The model assumes that no policy makers are capable of commitment to a rule. However, consistent with Rogoff (1985)...