Based on a unique measure of performance of English local governments in the provision of public services (Comprehensive Performance Assessment, CPA), this paper develops a simple analytical framework that fully encompasses the institutional features of the British system of local government...

We examine the impact of state-imposed mandates and fiscal limits on volunteer use and fundraising by local governments. Our model of contributions to local public services predicts that fiscal limits increase both volunteer use and fund-raising and that mandates increase volunteer use. These...

We exploit a quasi-natural experiment to identify the effect of regulatory accumulation on economic growth. Following a decade of poor economic growth, the Canadian province of British Columbia implemented a regulatory budget in 2001. We use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the...

Transferring public benefits to people in no need of them appears to be a waste of public money. Thus, there seems to be support for a move away from universal child benefits and towards means testing. This study presents a critique of this overly-simplistic view and proposes a very simple...

This paper develops a new bivariate jump model to study jump dynamics in foreign exchange returns. The model extends a multivariate GARCH parameterization to include a bivariate correlated jump process. The conditional covariance matrix has the Baba, Engle, Kraft, and Kroner (1989) structure,...