This paper surveys the empirical research on fiscal institutions of the last three decades. The main results are: (i) Constitutional or statutory fiscal limitations have in most cases proved to be effective in cutting down public expenditure, revenue, and debt. (ii) Budgetary proce-dures matter...

This paper examines the effect of local political decision-making institutions (i.e., direct democracy vs. representative democracy) on citizens' preferences toward public spending. Exogenous variation in institutions comes from a regression discontinuity design, which exploits a discrete change...