In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...

Financing the public health system represents a central reference point of the decisional algorithm necessary for ensuring an advanced management, in the sense that the purpose of this tactic is to analyse the current financial management, to formulate some observations and to present some...

The aim of this paper is to present results of an impact assessment applied to the social system in Apulia. In particular, Regione Puglia's Regional Law no. 19/2006 is examined. Following a gradual assessment approach a) it is evaluated whether the regulation achieved its general objectives and,...

I investigate causal machine learning (CML) methods to estimate effect heterogeneity by means of conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). In particular, I study whether the estimated effect heterogeneity can provide evidence for the theoretical labour supply predictions of Connecticut's...

Recent studies have proposed causal machine learning (CML) methods to estimate conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). In this study, I investigate whether CML methods add value compared to conventional CATE estimators by re-evaluating Connecticut's Jobs First welfare experiment. This...

Decentralization of provision of public services has been an important item in the agenda of developing countries. While some scholars and practitioners argue that decentralization is associated with improvements in provision due to higher accountability, others note its potential pitfalls. In...

This paper studies how fiscal decentralization affects local services. It explores a 1993 reform that increased the fiscal autonomy of Italian municipalities by replacing government transfers with revenues from a local property tax. Our identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the...

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 different categories of public expenditure in 19...

Looking at the decentralized provision of public education in a middle-income country, this paper estimates the impact of local autonomy on service quality, finding large heterogeneity in the effect across different levels of local development. In the year 2002, Colombian municipalities were...