1. The Local Budget as a Complex System—Concepts and Definitions -- 2. Fiscal Sustainability in the Short and Long Runs -- 3. The Revenue Module -- 4. The Expenditure Module -- 5. Debt -- 6. Economic Development -- 7. The Feedback Loop -- 8. Sustainability and Bliss -- 9. Conclusions and...

Fiscal rules are laws aimed at reducing the incentive to accumulate debt, and many countries adopt them to discipline local governments. Yet, their effectiveness is disputed because of commitment and enforcement problems. We study their impact applying a quasi-experimental design in Italy. In...

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 government fragmentation hypothesis (GFH) states that coalition governments spend more than single-party governments due to an underlying common pool problem. Using a large panel data set on 604 local governments in the German state of Baden-Württemberg for the 1994-2014 period, I test the...

This paper exploits a novel trial in Norwegian local elections in 2011 to provide empirical evidence on fiscal performance from lowering the minimum voting age from 18 to 16. Using a difference in differences research strategy, we find that this voting age change reduced the net operating...

In den letzen Jahren rückten vielfältige Gender Budgeting-Initiativen in den öffentlichen Fokus, die das Ziel hatten, die Gleichstellung von Frauen und Männern zu fördern. Ihnen wird ein großes emanzipatorisches und demokratisches Potential zugeschrieben. Während der...