The design of intergovernmental fiscal relations can help to ensure that tax and spending powers are assigned in a way to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Decentralisation can enable sub-central governments to provide better public services for households and firms, while it...

Finnish municipalities enjoy ample fiscal autonomy and provide or arrange the provision of a large share of public services. In recent years, their spending and debt has been increasing steadily, especially because of population ageing and increases in the cost of health care and social...

In this paper, we estimate the efficiency of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs) in Ghana, and investigate the impact of fiscal decentralization on the efficiency of local public goods and services delivery by MMDAs. Using data from composite budgets of all 216 MMDAs, we...

This paper studies how fiscal decentralization affects local services. It explores a 1993 reform that increased the fiscal autonomy of Italian municipalities by replacing government transfers with revenues from a local property tax. Our identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the...

This paper studies the impact of the health decentralization of funds and responsibilities that took place in Mexico in 1997 on state level health outcomes. It renders two main results. First, the magnitude of transfers from the federal government to states failed to take into account...

In this paper we argue that different preferences in a decentralized system lead to under provision of public goods. We analyze the provision of public primary education in nineteenth-century Prussia which was characterized by a linguistically polarized society and a decentralized education...

This paper studies whether the decentralization of public employment services (PES) increases job placements among the unemployed. Decentralizing PES has been a widely applied reform used by governments aiming to enhance their efficacy. However, economic theory is ambiguous about its effects,...

There have been numerous studies of the "impact" of HEIs on their host regions. These have typically focused on the demand for goods and services in the host region. The best of these studies employ regional input-output analyses. However, there has developed a "policy scepticism" about the...

The paper focuses on Romanian experiences regarding the financial strategies used by managers from pre-university education. In Romania, local public authorities provide funds to pre-university institutions. Given the sharp economic recession and the austerity measures imposed by Romanian...

To contribute to the debate about decentralization of education management, in this paper, we take advantage of the arbitrary rule used in Colombia to define the municipalities that can autonomously manage schools, to evaluate through a Regression Discontinuity methodology the effect of...