Many industrialized countries have recently implemented fiscal decentralization reforms assigning more competences and … spending responsibilities to sub-national governments. In this paper we investigate what leads to the decentralization of … findings on the negative link between regional income disparities and expenditure decentralization. A similarly negative …

before decentralization was implemented, even when looking within different local development ranges. Based on the analysis …

This paper studies how fiscal decentralization affects local services. It explores a 1993 reform that increased the … identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the degree of decentralization that stems from bombings during WWII …. Decentralization reduced local spending but expanded municipal services, such as nursery schools. These effects are larger in areas …

minimizing informational spillovers. To address this failure, we introduce a dynamic form of federalism in which the central …

rivalry in consumption of the publicly provided good. We identify three sources of welfare loss from decentralization … characteristics of the publicly provided good are an important determinant for the welfare costs of decentralization. …

. We show the potential existence of a poverty trap as a result of decentralization in taxation decisions. …

The political blessings of federalism are the core of our discussion. These benefits are operationalized as the … different cases, we conclude that the political force of the decentralization-theorem (Oates) is a sole and inverse function of … the population size of the nation: Next, the question is addressed how the gains from federalism react to variations in …