The literature on corruption makes unclear predictions on the relations between subsidiarity principle, according to which public decisions should be done at the lower level government possible, and corruption of public officials. In this paper, we compare two alternative regimes, centralised...

We study the Granger causality between the Shapley-Shubik index of voting power and Italian public expenditures from 1960 to 1990. The received wisdom that public expenditures' growth is determined by a cross-action of "all" the political groups elected by proportional electoral systems is not...

According to J.M Buchanan, Laffer effects, increases in revenues produced by tax cuts that offset the fall in tax revenues the reduction caused, are delayed through time. This occurs because the demand for goods and factors of production affected by the reduction of tax rates tend to increase...

We consider a set-up where two governments have either conflicting or matching preferences on the provision of differentiated (local) goods supplied by a common monopoly bureau. We develop a two-stage game. At stage-1, the two governments decide whether or not to merge into a single institution....

An employment package (EP), reducing the social security taxes (SC) and increasing labour flexibility, was introduced in Italy by the centre-left Government in 1997. We show econometrically that EP had positive effect also on the SC revenue. Using time series techniques, with data 1980-1996, we...

This article focuses on the carousel of VAT fraud consisting in multiple undue VAT rebates for goods exported and re-exported between EU countries. This fraud has been developed as a form of border VAT adjustment since the abolition of the borders within the EU countries. The carousel is...

The Italian health care expenditures, HCE, have been basically explained with two main groups of theories. (1) Those explaining the peculiarity of the HCE growth as depending on demand and supply factors, such as ageing population, public finance share of health care, number of practising...