The objective of the paper is to study the disciplining role of both market forces and regional governments own resources in the provision of educational services. The historical evolution of school regulation in Italy and Spain (in particular regarding the funding of private schools run by...

Corruption may affect voter turnout either by mobilizing citizens to go to the polls or by promoting voter disaffection. Using Spanish local and survey data, we study whether these effects depend on partisan leanings or the timing of scandals. Our results show that repeated episodes of...

One of the fundamental tenets of fiscal federalism is that, absent various sorts of externalities, decentralized governments that rely on own-source revenues should be more fiscally efficient than decentralized governments that rely on grant financing. The argument relies in part on the idea...

While electoral accountability should be stronger when responsibilities are clearly assigned to one political office, the involvement of higher tiers of government is often associated with policies specifically designed to improve local accountability. This paper investigates the impact of...

Data envelopment analysis and panel data stochastic frontier models are used to evaluate the impact of the 1995 renewal of regional political institutions and the 1998 tax reform (introduction of IRAP) on the efficiency of Italian regional governments. Both methodologies are applied to a...

We analyse the effects of local corruption on electoral outcomes with Spanish data. Based upon press reports published between 1996 and 2009, we are able to construct a novel database on corruption scandals and news related to bribe-taking in exchange for amendments to land use plans. Our data...