The political budget cycle (PBC) literature argues that governments expand deficits in election years. However, what happens when an economic downturn is expected? Will the government allow the deficit to expand even further, or will it resort to spending cuts and tax increases? When voters...

Employing a sample of Spanish municipalities from the Madrid region for the period 2010-2019, we study the influence of a politician's sex on political budget cycles (PBCs). The Madrid region is subject to a homogenous set of budget rules, which allows consistently categorising budget...

We study how policies limiting the spending capacity of local governments may reduce corruption. We exploit the extension of one such policy, the Domestic Stability Pact (DSP), to small Italian municipalities. The DSP led to a decrease in both recorded corruption rates and corruption charges per...

The cyclicality of economic recessions worsens fiscal stability and increases vulnerability to future shocks. This paper argues that there is need to center the concept of resilience (Boin & Van Eeten, 2013; Duit, 2016) as a frame for public financial management. The study introduces a theoretical...

How do public organizations adapt to unanticipated disruptions and what are the implications of those adaptations on social equity? An enduring debate in public administration pertains to the promise of adaption for innovative and scalable solutions as opposed to its potential unintended...

A widespread view in the "political budget cycles" literature is that incumbent politicians seek to influence voters' perceptions of their competence and/or preferences by using the composition of the fiscal budget as a signalling tool. However, little is known about whether voters actually...

A long-standing issue in political economics is whether party control makes a difference in determining fiscal and economics policies. This question is very difficult to answer empirically since parties are not randomly selected to govern political entities. This paper uses a...