Fiscal distress of local governments and municipalities is a non-negligible component of the public finance turmoil after the Great Recession. In this paper we consider a dataset of Italian municipalities over the period 2000-2012 and look for the main budget determinants of local default....

In the literature on fiscal federalism, vertical fiscal imbalances have been widely studied, while the theme of horizontal fiscal imbalances and inequality between local governments' fiscal capacities is still less explored. This paper contributes to fill the gap. A new method to compute fiscal...