The paper investigates the intertemporal spending behavior of Scandinavian local governments with particular attention to liquidity constraints imposed by balanced-budget-rules and other regulations. The main finding is that Danish local governments are more able to smooth current expenditures...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether efficiency in public service provision is affected by political and budgetary institutions, fiscal capacity, and democratic participation. In order to address this issue we take advantage of a new global efficiency measure for Norwegian local...

The paper analyzes the intertemporal spending behavior of Norwegian local governments with particular attention to liquidity constraints imposed by balanced-budget-rules (BBRs). The main findings are: (i) On average, local government spending behavior is neither perfectly forward looking nor...