This paper provides a political-economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making. To determine which policies are to be centralized, regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization and the regional cost shares of centrally decided...

The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true...

A couple of months before the Swedish election in 1998, the incumbent government distributed 2.3 billion SEK to 42 out of 115 applying municipalities. This was the first wave of a four-year long grant program intended to support local investment programs aimed at an ecological sustainable...

The paper compares decision-making on the centralisation of public goods provision in the presence of regional externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional spillovers is developed in which uncertainty over the true...

Governments do not have perfect information regarding the priorities and the needs of different groups in the economy. This lack of knowledge opens the door for different groups to lobby the government in order to receive the government's support. We set up a model of hierarchical contests and...

Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we still lack a theory of how political and fiscal institutions interact to shape the pork‐barrelling ability of national leaders in a federal parliamentary democracy. Focusing on party system attributes and governmental incentives...