Understanding corruption is at the heart of treating the dysfunctionality of many countries' public sectors. Yet, most corruption research suffers from one common problem: There is no "objective" measure of public-sector corruption for a cross-section of countries. Most studies on the...

We test the "war of attrition" models of fiscal performance on the sample of Italian governments from 1948 to 1994. We control for conditioning phenomena, like government stability, majority size, central bank independence, political budget cycle and external economic constraints, as well as for...

In Italy, the Regular Grant is the most important subsidy to private cultural institutions. Since 1996, law 534/96 has regulated its provision. This law greatly improves on the previous legislation, as it redefines the prerequisites to become a recipient and specifies performance indicators to...

The paper assesses the relative explanatory power of the Keynesian, the optimal finance, the contingent liability and several public choice theories of the determinants of public deficits on Italian 1950-1998 data. A vector error correction model suggests that deficits are sensitive to...

Understanding corruption is at the heart of treating the dysfunctionality of many countries' public sectors. Yet, most corruption research suffers from one common problem: There is no "objective" measure of public-sector corruption for a cross-section of countries. Most studies on the...

We investigate whether corporatist governance negatively affects growth: a) directly through higher transaction costs involved in the policy decision making process; b) indirectly, yielding growth retarding policy decisions. We construct a more accurate data set for 18 OECD countries in the...