Australia`s remarkable economic performance during the 1990s has not resulted in a significant convergence of real per capita income, output, and employment levels across the country`s states and territories. This paper explores the role of certain economic rigidities that may have contributed...

We exploit a series of discontinuities, at several population thresholds, in the allocation mechanism of federal transfers to municipal governments in Brazil to identify the causal effect of municipal spending on local labor markets, using a ‘fuzzy' regression discontinuity design. Our...

In this paper we examine economic disparities across regions in Russia and offer a theoretical treatment of various transfer rules between different regions. We analyze the principle of partial equalization, which implies that the more depressed regions should be subsidized by the more...