In the robust statistics literature, a wide variety of models have been devel- oped to cope with outliers in a rather large number of scenarios. Nevertheless, a recurrent problem for the empirical implementation of these estimators is that optimization algorithms generally do not perform well...

The aim of this paper is to test whether electoral systems and human development are linked. Using high-quality data and very simple panel data econometric techniques, we show that electoral systems play a critical role in explaining the difference in the levels of human development between...

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance (i.e. the dependence of sub-national governments on national government revenues to support their expenditures) is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to...

It has been suggested that …scal federalism is a good way to induce decentralized entities to behave parsimoniously, but this has been largely criticized in the literature, in particular because of the Common-Pool problem. In this paper, we present an extra facet of the latter problem. We...

The aim of this paper is to test if electoral systems and human development are linked. Using high quality data and very simple panel data econometric techniques, we show that electoral systems play a critical role in explaining the difference in the levels of human development between...

In the robust statistics literature, a wide variety of models has been developed to cope with outliers in a rather large number of scenarios. Nevertheless, a recurrent problem for the empirical implementation of these estimators is that optimization algorithms generally do not perform well when...