Durante los primeros años de la pasada década, el Distrito de Barranquilla enfrentó una severa crisis fiscal que llevó a la administración pública a acogerse a los distintos programas de saneamiento fiscal propuestos por el Ministerio de Hacienda y a cumplir las sanciones impuestas por el...

This paper studies Comprehensive Performance Assessment, an explicit incentive scheme for local government in England. Motivated by a theoretical political agency model, we predict that CPA should increase service quality and local taxation, but have an ambiguous effect on the efficiency of...

Program participation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the success of housing policies such as mortgage assistance for distressed homeowners. Low rates of take-up of available assistance among eligible homeowners have hampered the potential success of programs such as the U.S....

Zimbabwe has a sombre housing crisis in all its urban centres. All attempts by the government to vary housing delivery systems to ameliorate the problem have proved futile as the backlog it inherited from the colonial masters continues to soar. The situation has however been exacerbated by 2005...

This paper examines public expenditure incidence at small-area level in cities. The motivations for such research are briefly reviewed. The article reports on an attempt at measuring public expenditure across the majority of programmes down to the level of Census wards and the actual results...

We examine the dynamics of wealth accumulation distribution in Italy using data drawn from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a representative survey of the Italian population conducted by the Bank of Italy. We compare survey data with National Accounts data and discuss sample...

Rodriguez-Pose A. and Gill N. (2005) On the 'economic dividend' of devolution, Regional Studies 39 , 405-420. Recent political and academic discourse about devolution has tended to stress the economic advantages of the transfer of power from national to subnational institutions. This 'economic...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 included $88 billion of aid to state governments administered through the Medicaid reimbursement process. We examine the effect of these transfers on states' employment. Because state fiscal relief outlays are endogenous to a state's...

Increasing the attractiveness of voting is often seen as a remedy for unequal participation and the influence of special-interest groups on public policy. However, lower voting costs may also bring less informed citizens to the poll, thereby inviting efforts to sway these voters. We substantiate...

Long-term care expenditures constitute one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly in the United States and thus play a central role in determining the retirement security of elderly Americans. In this essay, we begin by providing some background on the nature and extent of...