Michael Greve's The Upside-Down Constitution is one of the most important works on constitutional federalism in years. It is the best exposition to date of the idea that the American Constitution establishes a federal system primarily devoted to promoting competition between state governments....

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether expenditure decentralization has contributed to weakening fiscal performance in Europe. Using a panel of EU15 countries for the period 1995-2011, we estimate three econometric models and ask the following questions: (1) does the form of spending...

We compare the size, structure and evolution of the public sectors in Canada and the United States primarily using national income accounting data. In the course of this investigation, which is accompanied by a substantial spreadsheet covering the period from 1929 to 2003/2004, questions are...

This Article exposes a misapplication of federalism as the driving force behind the Supreme Court's extreme narrowing of the 42 U.S.C. § 1983 remedy for beneficiaries of federal-state cooperative spending programs. Originally, the Court applied a presumption, via § 1983's straightforward...

Indonesia's fiscal position is generally sound and policy making prudent. However, the country still faces important challenges in terms of economic and social development. Infrastructure, education, health and social security are all spending areas that the government is trying to improve...

This article uses unique voting data on 331 federal propositions to estimate voter preferences in Swiss cantons. We document that preferences vary systematically with canton characteristics. In particular, cantons whose voters are more conservative, less in favor of redistribution and less...

This paper analyzes local political cycle in Czech municipalities over the period between 1997 and 2013. We apply the system GMM and the difference GMM estimators to identify distortion in current and capital expenditures per capita in electoral and pre-electoral years, while focusing on various...

Empirical evidence on economies of scale in healthcare is mostly based on the cost effects of hospital mergers. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper approaches the economies of scale issue by analysing the break-ups of municipal health centre federations. We use the...

Scotland is engaged in a lively and on-going debate on greater fiscal autonomy and independence, which is politically controversial, especially in respect of tax-varying powers. The Scottish Parliament has the power to make a balanced-budget adjustment in public expenditure by varying the basic...

In this paper, I estimate a structural panel vector autoregression to study the consequences of changes in U.S. state government fiscal policies for local economic activity in the short-term. My main result is that the state-level spending multiplier is relatively small and the tax multiplier...