This paper investigates pork-barrel spending, the inefficient effect of legislature size on public spending, in at-large electoral systems. Using a rich panel data set on German municipalities whose councils are elected at-large, we employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal...

In support of the growing need to understand federalism in the Philippines, sustainability framework and distribution of powers need be given as much attention along the inception of the political benefits of federalism

The literature on the government spending multiplier has implicitly assumed that an increase in government spending has the same (mirror-image) effect as a decrease in government spending. We show that relaxing this assumption is important to understand the effects of fiscal policy. Regardless...

We study fiscal spending multipliers of the UK economy using a time-varying parameter factor augmented vector autoregressive (TVP-FAVAR) model. We show that government spending multipliers vary over time and that most of the variation is cyclical: multipliers are typically above one in...

This paper examines a puzzle in the political economy of infrastructure in India -- the co-existence of relatively low shares of capital spending in public budgets alongside evidence of large demand for village infrastructure from poor voters. It argues that this pattern is due to infrastructure...