Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of...

Allocation decisions are vulnerable to political influence, but it is unclear in which situations politicians use their discretionary power in a partisan manner. We analyze the allocation of presidential disaster declarations in the United States, exploiting the spatiotemporal randomness of all...

We study distributive politics inside cities by analysing how local governments allocate investment projects to voters across neighbourhoods. In particular, we ask whether politicians use investment to target their own supporters. To this aim, we use detailed geo-located investment data from...

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...

We study the allocation of investment projects by municipal governments across groups of voters using data from a fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain between 2009 and 2011. This program provided municipalities with a large endowment to spend in public investments and required the...

This paper presents evidence of electoraly-motivated changes in the budget balance, public expenditures, composition of public expenditures and provincial revenues in Argentine provinces. The empirical study is made using panel data analysis for 22 provinces during the period 1985-2001....

This paper introduces a democratic voting process into an OLG economy in order to analyze the e ffects of a rising old-age dependency ratio on the composition of government spending and endogenous economic growth. Forward-looking agents vote each period on the public policy mix between...

This volume includes five self-contained chapters in the fields of public debt and fiscal transfer schemes. After an introduction to the topic, chapter 2 shows that the institutional setting of fiscal policy making needs to be considered when assessing the sustainability of fiscal policy. Using...

This paper explores the factors behind the time path of real spending and revenue in the West German states from 1975 to 2004. The empirical approach stresses robustness and takes into account a large set of economic and political variables. Our results suggest that common economic factors and,...

This paper presents evidence of electoraly-motivated changes in the budget balance, public expenditures, composition of public expenditures and provincial revenues in Argentine provinces. The empirical study is made using panel data analysis for 22 provinces during the period 1985-2001....